The Twelfth New Jersey at Gettysburg

This hill witnessed one of the more precise small-unit actions of the Battle of Gettysburg. On the afternoon of July second, eighteen sixty-three, a detachment of the Twelfth Regiment of New Jersey Volunteers charged the Bliss farmhouse and barn that stood here. In that assault, they captured seven Confederate officers and eighty-five enlisted men, the enemy's skirmish reserve.

The Bliss farm sat in the no-man's-land between the two armies and changed hands multiple times over two days of fighting. Both sides used the farm buildings as sniper and skirmish positions. The New Jersey monument erected here in eighteen eighty-eight was among the earliest placed on the field, part of a wave of veteran-driven commemoration that transformed Gettysburg into a national memorial landscape.