A new exhibition at the Seminary Ridge Museum in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, is bringing the faces of those who lived and worked in the Lutheran Theological Seminary during and after the Battle of Gettysburg out of the archives and into the public eye for the first time. The exhibition, titled “Sacrifice at Seminary Ridge,” opens on October 9 and runs through December 6. It is a collaborative effort between the museum and Military Images magazine, featuring wartime portraits and personal narratives to tell the stories of the sick Union soldiers, surgeons, and nurses whose lives intersected within the walls of the seminary building during the bloodiest battle of the war. The museum, which opened on July 1, 2013, the 150th anniversary of the battle, has spent years documenting the individuals connected to the seminary hospital.
The exhibition is the product of a partnership that took shape in January when Paul Rusinoff, a longtime contributor to Military Images magazine and a new member of the museum’s board of directors, proposed bringing his passion for Civil War photography to the museum’s mission. Rusinoff, along with Ron Coddington, the magazine’s editor, had previously organized traveling exhibitions focused on African American soldiers and Civil War nurses, and they saw an opportunity to apply that same model to the specific story of Seminary Ridge. The research process was intensive. Because approximately 685 individuals have been identified as having been associated with the seminary hospital, the team had to compare that list against vast photographic archives.
In some cases, collections were enormous; the Liljenquist Family collection at the Library of Congress, for instance, contains nearly 9,000 Civil War-era portraits. To tackle the scale of the project, the team used artificial intelligence and large language models to run a script that scanned the Library of Congress’s website, cataloged all 9,000 images into a spreadsheet, and cross-referenced them against the list of 685 identified individuals. This technological approach allowed them to identify 35 unique individuals, represented by roughly 50 total images, including some individuals with multiple portraits. The curators were highly selective about what they sought.
They needed images that were verified as period photographs, with the subject’s identity confirmed beyond any doubt. They also required access to the original photographs rather than newspaper or magazine reproductions, so they could create high-quality digital scans suitable for publication and exhibition. The search drew on contributions from private collectors and public institutions, with researchers including Capt. Joyce, Robert May, and Scott Hann playing significant roles in the writing and research.
The history of the seminary itself extends far beyond the famous first day of battle, when Union Brig. Gen. John Buford and his troops used the building’s cupola for observation. The institution was founded in 1826 in Gettysburg and moved to its current location in the fall of 1832, when Schmucker Hall, the iconic domed building, was completed.
During the battle, Dr. George New, the senior surgeon of the First Division, First Corps of the Army of the Potomac, established what was later called the first Union army hospital on the battlefield at the seminary. The building functioned as an ambulance station on the morning of July 1, a field hospital that day, and then a general hospital in the weeks that followed. It was likely the only location on the Gettysburg battlefield that served as all three types of medical facilities at various points, until it closed on September 16, 1863.
Knowledge of the hospital and its people owes a great deal to Michael Dreese’s 2002 book about the hospital, “The Hospital on Seminary Ridge at the Battle of Gettysburg. ” The museum’s staff also built on the work of Ben Neely, who compiled a patient list from the National Archives hospital records. Over time, that list has grown from about 475 patients to 505 today. The museum continues to add names a few times a year, often when a visitor arrives saying they have an ancestor who was wounded and treated at the seminary.
The list of surgeons and attendants has also expanded, thanks in part to Barbara Franco’s 2025 book “The Surgeons of Gettysburg. ” In total, roughly three dozen surgeons and around 200 attendants have been identified, including civilian nurses from Gettysburg and members of ladies’ charitable associations. Before this collaborative effort, the museum had photographs for only about 16 percent of the identified individuals, fewer than 80 people. Some of those were postwar images published in newspapers alongside obituaries, and some were wound photographs attached to patient case files.
There had never been a coordinated effort to locate and collect original portraits. This project changed that, and many of the images that were secured for the exhibition had never before been publicly displayed. These portraits, unlike the famous battlefield scenes, offer a more intimate view of the war. While photographers like Mathew Brady captured the wide-angle aftermath of battlefields, portrait photographs were personal artifacts, meant for a family album, a coat pocket, or a bedside table.
They were not intended for public consumption, and for a long time, they remained largely unknown. It was not until the postwar period, and especially the centennial era of the twentieth century, that these images began to emerge from families and enter the modern collecting market alongside rifles, uniforms, and swords. Over the past sixty years, this vast volume of artifacts has become a larger part of how people experience the Civil War. One fascinating artifact on display is a collection from Paul Rusinoff’s personal archive: a group of small tintype photographs, known as “gem tintypes,” showing a group of soldiers who had recovered together in a hospital in Philadelphia.
The inexpensive images, each inscribed with the individual’s name and unit, appear to have been made as keepsakes to memorialize their time together. Research has shown that more than half of the men in the collection had been wounded at Gettysburg, and two of them specifically had been treated at the Seminary hospital. One of those men, a 31-year-old member of the Iron Brigade, had survived a gunshot wound to the abdomen, a typically devastating injury at the time. Remarkably, he recovered, served out his enlistment in the Veteran Reserve Corps, and lived to be 87 years old, passing away in 1919.
The exhibition also draws on a famous pair of stereo images taken by Mathew Brady of the seminary building around July 15, 1863. The image appears remarkably peaceful, with the building looking quiet and pastoral, with daisies growing at the corner of the fence. Ron Coddington was struck by the realization that inside that calm-looking building, wounded soldiers, nurses, and surgeons were struggling to keep people alive. The combination of the exterior battlefield view and the interior personal portraits offers a powerful dual perspective on the human cost of the battle.
To allow modern audiences to experience the images the way 19th-century viewers did, the new issue of the magazine includes a pair of 3D glasses. The anaglyph images, created by John Richter of the Center for Civil War Photography, allow viewers to see the Brady photo and a portrait of Gettysburg civilian John Burns in three dimensions. The glasses, donated by the Center, feature their logo on the side. When asked which Civil War photograph they would most like to have witnessed being taken, the panelists offered varied choices.
Paul Rusinoff chose the famous photograph of three Confederate prisoners taken near the seminary. He speculated that the men may have been hospital attendants about to take an oath of allegiance and leave the battlefield, a theory he has written about in Military Images magazine, though he acknowledged that many myths and competing claims surround their identities. Cody Ash, the museum’s Director of Education and Interpretation, selected a panoramic view taken from the base of Seminary Ridge in mid-July, which captures the seminary building, the railroad cut, the Craugh house, and other iconic sites of the battle’s west side in a single frame. Ron Coddington said he would want to be part of every image, but he singled out a scene of Union officers, including generals Grant and Meade, sitting on church pews pulled into a yard, a quiet moment of discussion that offered a tempting sense of stepping directly into history.
The exhibition represents the convergence of two powerful aspects of Civil War photography: the classic battlefield landscape and the intimate portrait. By bringing the faces of the doctors, nurses, and soldiers out of the shadows, the exhibit offers a deeply personal way to connect with the history of Seminary Ridge and the broader story of the Battle of Gettysburg.