‘Civil War Lodge to take Monterey Pass’

    

Civil War Lodge of Research 1865 will return to Pennsylvania next month to visit the site of the Battle of Monterey Pass.

I admit this campaign has been unknown to me, possibly because it is overshadowed in history by Gettysburg, only about twenty miles northeast, and fought days earlier. As the Monterey Pass Battlefield Park & Museum website puts it:

After three days

of battle at Gettysburg…

...both sides had taken substantial losses. Robert E. Lee’s 50,000 remaining troops of the Army of Northern Virginia needed to withdraw from 80,000 remaining Union troops in George Meade’s Army of the Potomac. Where did they go?

Monterey Pass was the site of a battle that would determine whether Lee would be able to retreat and fight another day. Sixty miles of wagons, loaded with supplies needed to sustain Lee’s army, headed for the river crossing at Williamsport, Maryland to escape to Virginia. Twenty miles of those wagons made their way via Monterey Pass. During the night of July Fourth, 5,000 Union troops, including George Armstrong Custer, attacked this retreating wagon train in the middle of a raging thunderstorm.

The Monterey Pass Battlefield Park and Museum is a 125-acre natural, cultural & historical park located in Washington Township, Franklin County, Pennsylvania. The park and museum preserves a portion of Pennsylvania’s second largest Civil War battle.

The battle included the Toll House, site of the fiercest part of the battle where the Union broke the Confederate line. The Toll House still stands and is privately owned and occupied, though negotiations are underway to bring it into the Park. The Park includes miles of trails with magnificent views of the area….

The lodge, one of six research lodges at labor under the Grand Lodge of Virginia, will meet at Acacia Lodge 586 in Waynesboro on Saturday, July 18 at 10 a.m. After lunch, we’ll leave for the battlefield site.

Cashtown Inn

For dinner on both Friday and Saturday, we will gather at Cashtown Inn, itself at the center of the wartime storm.

Read about that here.

Looks like another great weekend with the lodge—my only Masonic appointment for July, and then I’m off duty until the John Skene Masonic Conference at the end of August in New Jersey. (Unfortunately, that will coincide with the Official Visit of MW Matthew Szramoski to Virginia’s research lodges, scheduled for Haymarket Lodge 313, on August 29. Listen, I can’t do everything.)