At Cemetery Ridge on the Gettysburg battlefield late on the afternoon of July 3, 1863, the smoke of the failed Pickett’s charge was slowly drifting away. The 12th New Jersey volunteer infantry had been in the thick of the fight to repel the charge. Raised mostly in the South Jersey counties along the Delaware River, the men had been in service just less than a year, but were already veterans. Twenty-year-old Sgt. George A. Bowen was shaken at what he saw.

“The field of battle is a site (sic) never to be forgotten, the dead and wounded lay as thick as one e’er saw sheaves…