Peach Orchard (disambiguation)

Peach Orchard may refer to:

The Peach Orchard

The Peach Orchard is a Gettysburg Battlefield site at the southeast corner of the north-south Emmitsburg Road intersection with the Wheatfield Road. The orchard is demarcated on the east and south by Birney Avenue, which provides access to various memorials regarding the "momentous attacks and counterattacks in…the orchard on the afternoon of July 2, 1863."

Geography

The Peach Orchard is on a hornfel along the northwest edge of the local geologic diabase sheet and at the "angle of the Peach Orchard" formed by the vertex of 2 low ridges: "one from Devil's Den, the other along the Emmitsburg road." The orchard drains southward into Rose Run, through Rose Woods, to Plum Run; and the orchard tract has a modern north-south embankment along the Emmitsburg road to the west of which a drainage depression separates the orchard from Warfield Ridge.

History

By 1858 on the southeast corner of the crossroads, the Peach Orchard had been planted by Reverend Joseph Sherfy, who had a homestead to the north on the opposite (west) side of the Emmitsburg Road. On the Battle of Gettysburg, Second Day, the "The Peach Orchard Salient" military position of the Army of the Potomac had been established from the "angle of the Peach Orchard" both northward along the Emmitsburg Rd and, for the "Wheatfield Road line", eastward. Union positions in the orchard prior to the July 2 military engagements included the 68th Pennsylvania Infantry on the west side at the south point of Graham's Emmitsburg Rd line, the 3rd Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment on the orchard's south (downhill) side near the Emmitsburg Rd, and on the north side of the orchard along the south side of the east-west road, Thompson's cannons and, closer to the Emmitsburg Rd, Ames' cannons. "It was three o'clock before [Confederate] Colonel Alexander, of Longstreet's corps, had his batteries unlimbered in the edge of the woods west and south of the peach orchard."