Gardener’s A Pic-Nic Party is set in a skiff on the shore of Antietam Creek. He thought it was an apt allusion to the cliché “War is not a Picnic,” but when published, no one noticed. It dropped from sight, lost in more dramatic images in Photographic Incidents of the War Gallery. Viewers today will understand Gardner’s allusion but are often unaware the picnic takes place five days after the single bloodiest one-day battle of the Civil War.
Antietam Maryland. Antietam Bridge. Looking across stream.
Gardner staged the stereograph. It’s not Antietam Bridge but Middle Bridge, which was untouched by battle action. It was at Burnside Bridge, a mile upstream, where the armies clashed. It was still filled with dead horses and much other debris. Middle Bridge was clear and clean, a perfect situation for a picnic in the creekside area below the abutment shows it when Garden composed his picnic party. An earlier stereograph shows the bridge and the shay used for the picnic just at the turn towards the creek. The skiff is visible in the water just below the leaning tree beside the abutment (foreground right).
Gardiner mislabeled Middle Bridge as Antietam Bridge in his photographs. This view of the bridge shows it untouched by battle. The shay on the road is probably used for the picnic, which was staged in the foreground right. LC-DIG-ppmsca-33362. Library of Congress
A magnifying glass helps to reveal details of the two women in shawls sitting in a skiff moored on the bank. One holds something that is probably hardtack, while the other holds a tin cup, probably soup, served by a Union soldier stirring the contents with a bayonet. An African American, an uninvited guest, stands holding the bridle of a horse a front of a shay. The identity of the picnickers is unknown.
* It was not unknown for Gardner to stage war scenes. A Pic-Nic Party at Antietam Bridge 22 September 1862. Library of Congress LC-DIG-cwpb-0025. Ninety of Gardner’s and James Gibson’s images of the battle are in the collection of the Library of Congress. The bloodiest part of the battle was fought Burnside Bridge across the Antietam Creek in Sharpsburg, Maryland;http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=alexander+gardner+antietam&sp=5&co=cwp..
Featured Image: Battlefield carnage littered the creek at Burnside Bridge about a mile upstream.
See Alexander Gardner. A Pic-Nic Party at Antietam Bridge, Virginia, 22 September 1862, stereoscope from Photographic Incidents of the War: Gardner’s Gallery (1862-1865). Library of Congress; William Frassanito. Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America’s Bloodiest Day. New York: Scriber’s Sons, 1978; Susan Moeller. Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat. New York: Basic Books, 1989; Anthony W. Lee and Elizabeth Young. On Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008.