An
Account of The Heroic Schoolteacher by Gettysburg Licensed Town Historian Jane
Malone
By Karen Hendricks
On the second day of battle, July 2, 1863, a Union officer
asked 21-year-old Sallie Myers to come to St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church to
help care for wounded men taking refuge there. The United Presbyterian Church
across the street was also turned into a makeshift hospital. Myers gathered a
group of friends to help at both locations.
She also took men into her family’s small home several doors
down on High Street to give them better care. Her family gave up their beds to
take care of soldiers, one of whom was Henry Huidekoper of New York, who lost
his arm in the battle. However, he recovered from his injuries and paid tribute
to the Myers family in an 1894 speech:
“John Burns has been termed the hero of Gettysburg, but that
title should go to one of the many women who, through the shot and shell of the
second and third days of July, or in the pain and misery of the next few days,
forgot all danger and all personal comfort (and)… cheerfully ministered to the
wants of the helpless wounded… I say this knowingly and feelingly, for while I
was a prisoner one of these good women (Miss Myers) took me to her own house,
where she and her sister were caring for others. I shall soon not forget… the
family of Myers.” (quoted in Sally Rogers’ book Ties of the Past).
Myers, a teacher who kept a diary, continued a life-long
correspondence with many of the men she took care of in the days and weeks
following the Battle of Gettysburg.
