P-3: Crenshaw’s Battery Group

Photograph P-3 was taken from a position just north of the northernmost gun of the Fredericksburg Artillery, facing north. The trees represented by the numbered green circles comprise those trees captured in the incredible 1932 William Storrick image featured on this page. Black circles represent trees not appearing or hidden from view in the 1932 photograph.

The Storrick Photograph

What These Trees Witnessed

The red box indicates the location of, and trees included in, photograph P-3, in the context of Pegram’s Battalion as a whole.

Crenshaw’s Artillery was the fourth in line (north to south) of Pegram’s Battalion of five batteries occupying this stretch of Seminary Ridge from 2 PM on July 2, through July 3, and into July 4, when Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia began its long, slow retreat back to Virginia.

Like its sibling batteries, Crenshaw’s Artillery (led by Capt. William Crenshaw) took part in the supporting artillery fire of July 2 and the artillery barrage of July 3 that preceded Pickett’s Charge. When the cannonade concluded, the central portion of a brigade of Virginia regiments, commanded by Col. John Brockenbrough, passed through Crenshaw’s guns. Please click here to read about the ignominious ending to the charge of Brockenbrough’s Brigade on July 3.

The Trees

Figure P-3: 6 witness trees can be identified in this 1932 photograph which appeared in William Storrick’s Gettysburg: The Place, the Battle, the Outcome. Tree #8, as well as another large tree standing today, are obscured by the large tree, no longer extant, marked by the red “X” in the Storrick image, but which can be seen in the modern photo to the right of Tree #7.

In 1932, William Storrick, a former forester for the park, and now recently retired supervisor of Licensed Battlefield Guides, published Gettysburg: The Place, the Battle, the Outcome. The book contains a cpuple of photographs in which we have been able to identify a number of witness trees. The most spectacular of the images is a shot taken from a position between Crenshaw’s Battery to the north and the Fredericksburg Artillery to the south. The photographer had aimed his camera north for this picture, and the result is a photograph in which 6 witness trees can be identified, one (a hickory) on the west side of West Confederate Avenue, and the remainder all white oaks to the east. Two of these trees (#7 and #12) also appear in the Rotograph Co. postcard which we discuss on the Pee Dee Artillery page.

Go to Tree #4
Go to Tree #7
Go to Tree #10
Go to Tree #12
Go to Trees #13 and #14