Some modern elements intrude on the setting. There's the stone observation tower, built by the Department of War in 1890 to assist in officer training, and the markers and the monuments that indicate troop positions. The roads that cross the battlefield are now paved. Light traffic passed by on routes 34 and 65; a water tower looms in the distance.
But if it isn't quite the 19th century, Antietam maintains a sense of rural quiet. With just a few visitors yesterday, the only noise along the Sunken Road at midday was the chirp of a few lonely birds and the sound of the wind rustling through the tall grass.
It was in these fields on the morning of Sept. 17, 1862, that the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, under Gen. Robert E. Lee, met the Union Army of the Potomac, under Gen. George B. McClellan. Nearly 100,000 men - including future President William McKinley and future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes - fought in a battle that raged for 12 hours.
`A storm of balls'
"Such a storm of balls I never conceived it possible for men to live through," Confederate Lt. Col. A.S. "Sandie" Pendleton would write. "Shot and shell shrieking and crashing, canister and bullets whistling and hissing most fiend-like through the air until you could almost see them."
By the time the smoke and dust had cleared, an estimated 3,650 men lay dead. The Sunken Road, piled high with bodies, would be rechristened Bloody Lane.
On the battlefield yesterday, the cell tower proposal was news to Steve Rainey. The State College, Pa., man, a machinist at Penn State University, was visiting the battlefield with his son.
"I appreciate the fact that they're talking about disguising it, instead of just putting up a steel skeleton," he said. "But aren't there other places they could put it?"
Ben Rainey, a student at Penn State, was flat out against the proposal, disguise or no.
"I just can't see a tower being put out here," he said. "Especially down in the area of Bloody Lane. It feels somewhat sacred. If they let that in here, what next?"
Ned Cole calls Antietam his favorite battlefield. The Erie, Pa., man, a Vietnam veteran retired from the Border Patrol, figures he's visited eight times in the past 20 years. Yesterday, he was passing through on the way to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.
Cole was unconcerned by the cell tower proposal.
`No big deal'
