Civil War book wins Gettysburg roundtable award for Penn Township author

Penn Township author Ron Kirkwood spent 17 days in 2022 at the National Archives in Washington, DC, scouring hundreds of pension files for the stories of Civil War soldiers and their families.

Kirkwood, 70, a Michigan native, worked more than four decades as a newspaper and magazine editor — for publications such as the York Daily Record, Harrisburg Patriot-News and USA Today — before his retirment in 2013.

Despite Kirkwood’s absence from the newsroom, his curiosity and passion for learning remained.

He began volunteering for the Gettysburg Foundation, which generates hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to preserve the nearby national military park. But Kirkwood was soon directed to one of the foundation’s newest initiatives at the time — an 80-acre farm restored to its 1863 appearance.

The more Kirkwood researched the farm’s history, the more he realized he needed to tell its story.

The 100-page book Kirkwood envisioned turned into two several-hundred-page publications about the farm, its two field hospitals, the soldiers treated there and the families left grappling with the loss of loved ones who served.

The first book, “‘Too Much for Human Endurance’: The George Spangler Farm Hospitals and the Battle of Gettysburg,” was published in 2019.

The second, “‘Tell Mother Not to Worry’: Soldier Stories from Gettysburg’s George Spangler Farm,” hit the shelves in 2024. It was recognized in May with the Gettysburg Civil War Roundtable’s annual distinguished book award.

“It’s quite an honor, from this roundtable, to receive something like this,” Kirkwood said. “I’m glad the Gettysburg Foundation is being recognized for saving this farm from development.”

The roundtable considers eight books for the award each year, said Therese Orr, chair of the selection committee.

“(Our) members felt that Ron’s book best illustrated its mission to award the best book published in 2024 on the Gettysburg campaign, the Gettysburg civilian experience or the history of the Gettysburg National Military Park,” Orr said in a statement.

“The committee was especially impressed with the amount of research it took to find the information on all of the soldiers and family members that wer highlighted in this book.”

Author puts spotlight on Gettysburg Foundation

The George Spangler Farm housed the 11th Corps and Granite Schoolhouse hospitals, which administered care to soldiers wounded in Gettysburg during the Civil War. The foundation purchased the property in 2008 for $1.8 million, sparing it from development.

It spent $3 million across the next five years to restore the farm to historical accuracy.

“They rehabbed it with such attention to detail that they used horse hair in the mortar of these buildings for a bonding agent, because that’s what they used in the 1800s,” Kirkwood said.

In addition to overseeing the care of more than 1,900 wounded soldiers, the farm served as a home base for the Union’s reserve troops.

The property’s Powers Hill gave Commander George Meade easy access to the battlefield, by which Brigadier General Joshua Chamberlain led the 20th Maine Infantry Regiment to defend the Union’s position at Little Round Top.

“They got there so quickly,” Kirkwood said, “because they spent the day on the George Spangler Farm right behind the line.”

Kirkwood: ‘We need to know these people’

But Kirkwood was not content with retelling the basic details of the Civil War conflict.

“I just wanted to get the stories of the soldiers out there, of the surgeons out there, of the nurses out there — the nurses who held the hands of the dying soldiers and prayed with them,” he said.

“I wanted all these people who were on this farm. I wanted to tell their stories as (best) I could, because they are important stories and we need to know these people and understand these people.”

Kirkwood searched far and wide for any scrap of information he could find on the George Spangler Farm.

He drove more than a hundred miles from York, his home at the time, to read a book — only available in the Easton Public Library — about one of the regiments stationed at the farm. He visited a historical society in Buffalo, N.Y. to dig up information on a soldier in the state’s 154th Regiment who spent time in the property’s hospitals.

Kirkwood and his wife, Barbara, even drove to Kansas to visit the burial site of one of the farm’s namesakes.

“If I got two, three, four paragraphs out of this whole book on this hospital, then I was happy,” Kirkwood said, “because that was information that was not out there anywhere else in the world.”

National Archives documents informed book

The pension files Kirkwood unearthed at the National Archives proved particularly helpful.

To receive a pension, wounded soldiers had to document the pain or loss of ability they experienced because of their injury. The mothers and wives of soldiers killed in combat, who once relied on their loved one for financial support, had to do the same.

“These stories, these pensions, outlined all these fascinating, sad details about what these men and these families (were) going through,” Kirkwood said. “These men might have survived the war, but many of them were miserable for the rest of their lives because of their injury and what they went through at Gettysburg.”

Kirkwood is grateful for the stories he told in his two books.

But after nearly a decade of researching for 10 to 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week, Kirkwood is putting down the pen. He and his wife moved to Penn Township two years ago to be closer to family in Michigan and their oldest daughter and three grandchildren in Pittsburgh.

“That’s my priority now, my family,” Kirkwood said, “rather than being all-consumed with research and writing books.”