Wrightsville and the Burning Bridge, 1863
Near York, Pennsylvania
On the evening of June twenty-eighth, eighteen sixty-three, Confederate Brigadier General John Brown Gordon marched eighteen hundred troops toward Wrightsville on the Susquehanna River, aiming to cross into Lancaster County and push on toward Harrisburg or Philadelphia. Fewer than fifteen hundred Union militia held the far bank. When the Confederate artillery opened up, the Union line collapsed.
But as the Federal troops retreated, they did something that may have changed the course of the war: they set fire to the mile-long covered bridge behind them. The entire structure burned to the waterline in six hours. Gordon's men, who had been prepared to push deep into Pennsylvania, received orders the next day to fall back toward a crossroads town called Gettysburg.
Wrightsville marked the farthest east in Pennsylvania that organized Confederate troops would reach.
