Armed Combatants Waged a War of Graffiti

Mark Stroud photo, May 2012 (Graffiti Soldiers)

During the Civil War, Landon House in Urbana, Frederick County, was occupied first by Confederate troops, then by Union troops, and on the house’s walls they waged a battle of graffiti.

Writing about this episode in 1973, the house’s then-owner, Marion Stancioff, quotes at length from a 1910 volume, Regimental History of 155^th Pennsylvania Volunteers (Antietam to Appomattox). I have broken up the long paragraphs for ease of online reading. Clearly, the young Pennsylvanians were delighted to bivouac in what had been a girls’ school.

One of the rendezvous affording a night's shelter for the broken down and foot-sore inexperienced soldiers was a Young Ladies' Seminary building recently vacated. There were many rooms and dormitories in the building, also a fine orchard of ripe apples and peaches adjoining, and plenty of limpid water, all of which made it for a night’s lodging a most welcome discovery.

All the rooms on the different floors were occupied by the soldiers who had dropped out of the ranks from exhaustion. The fatigued occupants retired very early.

The Confederates of Longstreet's Corps had occupied this building a few nights previous. They had written their autographs, and many unpatriotic inscriptions, with burnt sticks, on the beautifully, white-plastered walls. They had registered their names, ranks, and regiments conspicuously; some recording disloyal epigrams and other epitaphs on Abraham Lincoln.

The Union troops (about one hundred in number) who found shelter in the hospitable seminary also took burnt sticks and recorded tributes far from complimentary to one Jefferson Davis and the Southern Confederacy, indulging at the same time in loyal cartoons of Lincoln, Washington, etc.

The names of John H. Lancaster, Theophilus Callen, Newell D. Loutsenheiser, Thomas P. Tomer, James I. O’Neil, Robert P. Douglass, Hugh Leonard, James Finnegan and John Crookham, all of the One Hundred and Fifty-fifth, are among those now recalled as having duly recorded their names, ranks, etc., that night on the walls of the parlors of the seminary.

Private McKenna, of Company ‘B,’ especially distinguished himself on this occasion as an [next word unclear] artist, and was given three cheers by the comrades who witnessed his performance, and unanimously voted Regimental artist.

Before resuming the march the next morning, the seminary orchard was invaded by the visiting Union soldiers and the ripe apples and peaches liberally appropriated at breakfast.

Moreover, Marion Stancioff added, the graffiti was still on the walls as of the mid-20^th century:

The graffiti scratched on the walls by the Confederate soldiers were found by the Stancioffs when they began removing wallpaper over the mantle in the northwest first floor room. Satyrical drawings and messages are still legible, covering almost the entire wall area above the mantle, and remain in a nearly perfectly preserved state.

The word “satyrical” may be a misspelling of “satirical,” but I like to think that Stancioff, who was well educated, meant to play with the word “satyr,” and is delicately suggesting that the “drawings and messages” were bawdy.

Landon House has changed hands multiple times through the years, but as recently as November 2013, the graffiti was still in place, judging from the photo posted on Facebook by the then-owners, who briefly rebranded the property as Silk Mill Weddings and Events.

In a great public service, the Silk Mill owners also had local historian Beverly J. Crawford research the history of the graffiti and the biographies of the Union graffiti artists. (The names of the Confederate graffiti artists are apparently unknown.) In a series of Facebook posts, the Silk Mill owners shared many of these details, which otherwise might have been lost.

The Pennsylvania volunteers were on their first forced march of the war, from Washington, D.C., to Frederick, Maryland, and though they badly needed a rest, the young men, several of them teenagers, were delighted to bond with one another, and to get back at the Confederates – who had vacated the house only a week before – by adding their own defacements to the walls.

Crawford dated the Union soldiers’ overnight stay at Landon House as 16 Sept. 1862, which would place it on the literal eve of the Battle of Antietam, where any lingering thoughts of the war as a grand adventure would be dashed forever.

While ten of the graffiti artists are named in the regimental history, the Crawford research posted on Facebook on 2013 involves only five of them. Note that in some cases, Crawford’s spelling differs from that provided by Stancioff.

Private McKenna, “unanimously voted Regimental artist,” was himself the author of the regimental history. Pittsburgh native Charles F. McKenna (1844-1922) was 17 when he was cheered by his comrades. He would fight at Antietam, Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg and Appomattox. After the war, back home in Pittsburgh, he distinguished himself not as an artist but as a lawyer, then a judge, rising to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and to the federal bench. For years president of the Gettysburg Battlefield Commission, he received a Congressional Medal of Honor during the 50^th-anniversary commemoration of the battle in 1913.

 
Private James P. O’Neill (1844-1902), also 17 at the time, was a Philadelphia native who was bound for the priesthood, and at the top of his class at St. Michael’s Seminary in Pittsburgh, when he enlisted. Seriously wounded at Spotsylvania, O’Neill never returned to the priesthood, instead becoming a teacher, a railroad brakeman and, finally, a newspaper reporter. 

 
Corporal Thomas J. Tomer (1842-1923), who had just turned 20, would fight his way to the summit of Little Round Top in Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, only to be seriously wounded. He was helped to safety by two of his fellow graffiti artists, McKenna and O’Neill, but his battlefield duties were over. A native Pennsylvanian, he lived the rest of his days in Canton, Ohio, though the Facebook post doesn’t tell what he did for a living.

 
Private Newell D. Loutzenheiser later was stationed to guard the Youghiogheny bridge near Oakland, Garrett County, as part of the “Youghiogheny Squad.” He was killed 8 May 1864 in Virginia in the aftermath of the Battle of the Wilderness.

 
Private James Finnegan, perhaps older than his mates, was a married man with an entrepreneurial streak who made extra money during the war by barbering his fellow soldiers and by washing and darning their clothes. The Facebook post also details a cruel trick later played on Finnegan:

 
At Fredericksburg, he and some comrades visited an abandoned bank and found some old cancelled promissory notes. Finnegan, who could not read, asked someone to tell him what they said. This person very seriously informed him that what he found amounted to $100,000 and the notes were “as good as gold.”

Finnegan offered to split this new found wealth with a friend and suggested that they take leave for Ireland. According to the story teller, it took “great efforts to eradicate from the mind of Finnegan the ideas and visions of great wealth he had acquired.”

By leaving their marks on the walls at Landon Hall, marks that lasted (mostly by happy accident) into the 21^st century, Finnegan and his comrades were part of an ancient tradition of “war graffiti” now recognized for its historical, artistic, sociological, even psychological importance.

Other instances of Civil War graffiti in Western Maryland can be found in the Hinkle House in Cumberland, Allegany County, which now houses Puccini Restaurant, and in Linden Hall in Williamsport, Washington County. Nearby examples across the Potomac can be found in Morgan’s Chapel in Berkeley County, West Virginia; Roeder’s Store in Harpers Ferry in Jefferson County, West Virginia; the old courthouse in Winchester in Frederick County, Virginia; and Belle Grove Plantation in Middletown, Frederick County, Virginia. Professor Stephen Robinson of George Mason University has a website devoted to Civil War graffiti and where it can be found.

In 2014, Kim A. O’Connell wrote for The New York Times an appreciation of these works:

Throughout the war, Union and Confederate soldiers wrote graffiti on the walls of houses, churches, tunnels and caves, using whatever implements they had on hand – mostly charcoal or pencils, but also burnt sticks or knives. Soldiers left behind their names and regiments, crude pictures and jokes, political statements, taunts to the enemy and prayer requests. Writing graffiti was a soldier’s way of validating his existence in the maelstrom of war, of literally making a mark on the world while he was still in it. It was also a social act, not unlike posting a status update on social media today. Markings often begat responses, spurring lively debates.

In fact, these were examples of what we today would call “trash talk,” another New York Times writer, Jonathan Bratten, observed in 2018. Himself a combat veteran of the Afghan war, Bratten concluded his essay with this paragraph:

On a battlefield, soldiers stand alone. They are surrounded by their comrades, but their fate is intrinsically bound up with death; their own or someone else’s. Maybe it’s that knowledge that gives people an instinctual urge to leave their mark. It’s what drove Achilles in Homer’s “Iliad” to seek immortality through his deeds, Thucydides to leave behind a testament of his experiences in “History of the Peloponnesian War” and some guy to commemorate his Iraq war service by spray-painting “We caught Saddam. All you newby’s top that s[**]t.” For some, it’s driven by the desire to be remembered. For others, it’s a small act of rebellion on a battlefield where there is little room for dissent. To me, it seems like a simple appeal not to be forgotten in an environment scant on humanity.

I don’t know where the Landon House war graffiti is now, but I hope it lasts into the 22^nd century.

Today Landon House is surrounded by suburban development, including Landon House Way and Landon House Lane, where a house sold for $470,000 in September 2021.

But the house is still visible to passer-by, most of whom don’t know about its strange history. It’s just north of the Landon Crossing shopping center on Urbana Pike, which is just west of Fingerboard Road, a.k.a. Highway 80. Remember, it’s private property, so look from afar without trespassing.

Sources:

Bratten, Jonathan. “The History Behind the Graffiti of War.” The New York Times Magazine. 18 July 2018. Accessed 18 Nov. 2021 at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/magazine/war-graffiti.html.

“Drawings of Abraham Lincoln, another face and signatures,” Graffiti Soldiers, accessed November 18, 2021, https://drstephenrobertson.com/Graffiti_Soldiers/items/show/1038.

O’Connell, Kim A. “Graffiti and the Civil War.” The New York Times Opinionator. 25 July 2014. Accessed 18 Nov. 2021 at https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/25/graffiti-and-the-civil-war/.

“Silk Mill Weddings/Events.” https://www.facebook.com/silkmillurbana. Accessed 18 Nov. 2021.

“Stancioff House.” Maryland Historical Trust. https://mht.maryland.gov/nr/NRDetail.aspx?NRID=283&FROM=NRMapFR.html. Accessed 16 Nov. 2021.

Stancioff, Marion Mitchell. National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form, dated 10 Nov. 1973. Certified by Arthur C. Townsend, State Historic Preservation Officer, 24 Oct. 1974. PDF accessed 16 Nov. 2021 via Maryland Historical Trust. https://mht.maryland.gov/nr/NRDetail.aspx?NRID=283&FROM=NRMapFR.html. 

Wallace, Edie. "Marking Time: Civil War Graffiti in the Catoctin Region." Catoctin History, Fall 2003. Pages 10-18. PDF accessed 18 Nov. 2021 via Graffiti Soldiers. https://drstephenrobertson.com/Graffiti_Soldiers/exhibits/show/graffitisites/houses/linden-hall.