On October 9, a new exhibition opened at the Seminary Ridge Museum in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, bringing together two collections of Civil War-era photographs in a way that had never been done before. The exhibition, Sacrifice on Seminary Ridge, ran until December 6 and used wartime portraits and personal histories to tell the stories of the sick Union soldiers, surgeons, and nurses whose lives intersected inside the walls of the Lutheran Theological Seminary during and after the Battle of Gettysburg. The exhibition was the product of a partnership between the museum and Military Images magazine, a publication dedicated to preserving and interpreting Civil War photography. The collaboration began when Paul Russinoff, a longtime collector and researcher of Civil War images, joined the museum’s board in January.
Russinoff had spent decades studying photographs of the war, and he saw an opportunity to bring that passion to the museum. He proposed an exhibition built around the faces and stories of the people who had actually been inside the seminary building during some of the most difficult weeks of the war. The idea drew on a model the magazine had already developed. Ron Coddington, the magazine’s editor, had previously organized traveling exhibitions called Faces of Freedom, which focused on Black Union soldiers, and Faces of Civil War Nurses, which highlighted the women who cared for the wounded.
Both exhibitions had traveled around the country. The new project, however, presented a different challenge. Instead of drawing on a broad theme, it required finding photographs of specific individuals who had been in one particular building during one particular battle. That building had a long history before the war.
The Lutheran Theological Seminary had been founded in Gettysburg in 1826 and moved to its current location on the ridge in 1832, when Schmucker Hall, the iconic building with its cupola, was completed. For decades, it was the main structure on campus, housing everything a student of theology needed. On June 30, 1863, the building became something else entirely. The cupola, originally designed for ventilation, was used for observation by Union signal officers, including Lieutenant Aaron Jerome, who served directly under Brigadier General John Buford.
When the battle began on the morning of July 1, the seminary became the site of the first field hospital of the Army of the Potomac, established by Dr. George New, the chief surgeon of the First Division of the First Corps. New later called it our first hospital on the battlefield. The building’s role changed over the following weeks.
On the first day of fighting, it served as an ambulance station and then a field hospital. By the evening of July 1, the ridge had fallen to Confederate forces, and hundreds of wounded Union soldiers became prisoners of war, stranded behind enemy lines. When the Confederate army withdrew on July 4 and 5, the hospital came back under Union control, and wounded Confederates who had been brought there suddenly found themselves trapped behind Union lines. The seminary was not just a hospital.
It was also a prison, depending on the moment. Over time, it became a general hospital, eventually treating around 57 Confederate soldiers alongside Union men. The hospital remained open until September 16, making it likely the only place on the Gettysburg battlefield that served as all three types of medical facility: ambulance station, field hospital, and general hospital. The task of identifying the people inside that building had been ongoing for years.
A list of patients, surgeons, and attendants began taking shape in the early 2000s, largely through the work of the Adams County Historical Society and Ben Neely, who compiled records from the National Archives and casualty reports from both armies. By the time the museum opened in 2013, the list contained roughly 475 patients. It had since grown to 505. The museum also identified about three dozen surgeons and nearly 200 attendants, including civilian nurses from Gettysburg, army nurses, and members of charitable ladies’ associations.
In total, around 685 names were connected to the hospital. Much of what was known about the hospital came from Michael Dreese’s 2002 book The Hospital on Seminary Ridge at the Battle of Gettysburg. Without that work, the museum staff acknowledged, they would not have known nearly as much about the building, the battle, or the broader history of the seminary, including the national antislavery movement led by its founder, Samuel Schmucker, and the student body that had been torn between North and South. When the museum began digitizing its records two years before the exhibition, it received grant funding that allowed it to move from static printed lists to interactive digital documents that could be updated from staff offices in real time.
For the first time, the museum also began actively collecting photographs of the people on its lists. Before the project, they had images for only about 16 percent of the individuals, fewer than 80 people. Many of those were postwar images published in newspapers or wound photographs attached to medical case files. There had never been a coordinated effort to locate original photographs.
For the new exhibition, the magazine and the museum worked together to search both private collections and public institutions. One major resource was the Liljenquist Family Collection at the Library of Congress, which holds roughly 9,000 Civil War-era portraits. Matching that collection against the list of 685 names required a patient and methodical approach. The team used large language models to scan the Library of Congress website, compile all 9,000 images into a spreadsheet, and compare them against the hospital roster.
The effort paid off. They identified 35 individuals, with about 50 photographs total, including multiple poses of some people. Many of these images had never been publicly displayed. The photographs came in many forms.
Some were portraits meant for family albums or jacket pockets, private objects that had stayed out of public view for generations. Unlike the famous battlefield photographs taken by Mathew Brady and others immediately after the fighting, these portraits did not show the scale of the conflict or the devastation of the landscape. They showed individual faces. They had been created for personal reasons, to remember someone or to be remembered.
As one participant put it, these images were the closest thing to time travel that exists, capturing exactly what was in front of the lens more than 160 years ago. One particularly striking item in the exhibition was a collection of images from Russinoff’s own holdings. It was a group of small tintypes, known as gem tintypes, from a hospital in Philadelphia. The men in these images had been recovering together in a hospital ward, and they had decided to have their pictures taken as a group, each image carefully inscribed with the individual’s name and unit.
Through research, more than half of those men were identified as having been wounded at Gettysburg. Two of them had been patients at the seminary hospital. One of those men, a 31-year-old volunteer in the Iron Brigade, had been shot in the abdomen. The bullet missed his spine by about an inch, a wound that was usually fatal in the Civil War.
Remarkably, he recovered, served out his full enlistment in the Veteran Reserve Corps, and lived to the age of 87, dying in 1919 after seeing the end of World War I. The focus of the museum on the individuals inside the building offered a different perspective from the classic battlefield views. One of the most famous photographs of Seminary Ridge, taken by Brady around July 15, 1863, shows the seminary building in the background, looking calm and peaceful. Fences are intact, grass is green, and a man sits on a fence in the foreground.
The image was taken as a stereograph, intended to be viewed in three dimensions, and the magazine’s current issue included 3D glasses so readers could see it the way nineteenth-century viewers would have. But as one participant pointed out, the calm exterior of that photograph hid what was happening inside the building, where wounded soldiers, nurses, and surgeons were still fighting to keep men alive. The exhibition aimed to bridge that gap, combining the external view of the battlefield with the internal view of the individuals who lived through it. The medical system that operated at the seminary was itself a product of wartime innovation.
At the start of the war, hospitals were organized at the regimental level, often staffed by local doctors with limited professional experience. That changed in 1862 when Dr. Jonathan Letterman took command of the medical department of the Army of the Potomac. Letterman reorganized medical care around division-level field hospitals and introduced an early form of triage, classifying the wounded into three categories: those with minor wounds who did not need surgery, those whose wounds required surgical intervention such as amputation, and those with fatal wounds, typically to the abdomen, neck, or head, which no surgeon of the time could treat.
The system saved countless lives and remains the foundation of military medical practice today. The Sacrifice on Seminary Ridge exhibition, the permanent museum displays, and the accompanying article in Military Images all worked toward the same goal: showing the faces and telling the stories of the men and women who had been inside the seminary during and after the battle. Before the project, the museum’s permanent exhibits had only been able to display a few dozen photographs. The new effort brought in 35 newly identified individuals, some of whom had never been seen in any form.
The hope, as expressed by those involved, was that visitors would leave with a deeper understanding of the hospital, the seminary, and the war itself, and that more people would be drawn through the museum’s doors to experience that history firsthand.
