Cold Harbor: June 2, 1864

Cold Harbor: June 2, 1864. Hanover County Parks and Recreation. This drawing (below) by the famous Civil-War artist, Alfred Waud, provides a rare glimpse of the Cold Harbor battlefield, sketched from this very spot on June 2, 1864. Union cannons blazed away at the Confederate lines only a half-mile in front of you. The Garthright House and outbuildings can be seen in the background. The tree-lined Cold Harbor road sits off to the right. The sketch appeared in the June 25, 1864, issue of Harper’s Weekly with the following description by the artist:, “At this point the Second and Sixth Corps join. One of Gibbon’s brigades (M’kean’s Second Disision, Second Corps) appears on the left of the picture, massed under a crest. In this brigade are the Nineteenth and Twentieth Massachusetts, etc. To the right of the house is the old Jersey brigade of the Sixth Corps. Their term of service expires June 3, and they leave the army with an unsurpassed reputation. The lines these troops hold have been taken from the enemy, and are not more than a hundred yards from the rebel front. The smoke on the extreme left marks the position of a section of Stevens’s [5th Maine] battery, while Mott’s [3rd New York Independent] battery occupies the foreground. These and other batteries at this point soon silenced the enemy’s artillery, while musket-balls in reckless profusion swept the rifle-pits, among which the dead and wounded lay thickly.”