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The Battle of South Mountain
Fox's Gap - Wise's Well
Daniel Wise (1802-1876)
In 1862 Wise, then age 60, lived with his son
John and daughter Matilda in a small cabin at Fox's Gap.
Wise eked out a living as farmer, day laborer, and "Root Doctor," a practitioner
of folk medicine. During the September 14 battle, Wise's cabin became the focal point for
the day's combat at Fox's
Gap. The Wise family fled from the cabin
early in the day and took shelter in a nearby church, most likely Mount Carmel Church at
the foot of the mountain. The day after the battle the cabin was used as a Union field
hospital. Not until after the burial details were finished on September 18 could the
family return home. The landscape they returned to was completely changed. In the field to
the east of their house were Union graves. Shallow trenches containing the dead
Confederates flanked either side of the bullet riddled cabin. Perhaps worst of all, a
Union burial detail had put 58 dead Confederates down the family's dry well. Wise
never received compensation from the U.S. government for these property damages. To add
insult to injury, a regimental history was published four years after Daniel Wise's death
that attributed the dumping of the Rebels down the well to Wise himself. This unfounded
story, popularized in the history of the 21st Massachusetts Infantry, became an accepted
legend of the Maryland Campaign. Daniel Wise is buried in the Middletown Reformed
Cemetery.
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