Gettysburg Campaign: Confederate Scouts at Mechanicsburg
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
In the last days of June eighteen sixty-three, the Civil War came to this doorstep. Confederate General Albert G. Jenkins and his cavalry staff occupied this house on June twenty-eighth and stayed through June thirtieth.
Jenkins commanded a brigade under General Ewell, and his mission in Mechanicsburg was reconnaissance: probing the roads and approaches toward Harrisburg, mapping the routes for what might have been a Confederate assault on the Pennsylvania state capital. An attack on Harrisburg was being prepared. Then the orders changed.
Lee needed his scattered forces concentrated, and Jenkins's brigade was redirected south toward a small Pennsylvania crossroads town called Gettysburg. The men who had been eyeing Harrisburg's bridges from this house rode off on June thirtieth to take part in the largest battle ever fought in North America. The house they left behind was built in seventeen eighty-seven.
It still stands.
