UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD STEREO VIEW, “WALL CHARGED BY PICKETT,” GETTYSBURG

UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD STEREO VIEW, “WALL CHARGED BY PICKETT,” GETTYSBURG

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$25.00

Quantity Available: 1

Item Code: 2026-1908

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This is a stereo view published by Underwood & Underwood, the largest stereo view maker of its time. Their imprint runs along the left edge: “New York, London, Toronto-Canada, Ottawa-Kansas.” The right edge names their works and studios in Arlington and Westwood, New Jersey. The caption reads “(80) Wall charged by Pickett, S. to Round Top—the War’s ‘High Water Mark’ clump of trees, Gettysburg,” with an Underwood copyright of 1908. The two nearly identical photos were taken by a camera with two lenses set about eye-width apart. Seen through a stereoscope, they merge into one three-dimensional image.

The scene shows a Civil War field gun on its carriage beside a low fieldstone wall, with a pyramid of artillery shells stacked at the far left. An elderly, white-bearded man in a fedora and dark suit sits on a small granite marker, looking toward the gun. He may be a veteran; photographers of the period often posed old soldiers at the battlefields, but the card doesn’t identify him. Behind him, a granite regimental monument is partly visible. In the middle distance, horse-drawn tour carriages carry visitors along the avenue. On the horizon is Round Top, which matches the caption’s note that the view looks south.

As for condition, there’s a “rub” of surface loss over the wheel hub in the left image, otherwise the gray mount and its arched-top images look well preserved. The back of the card carries Underwood’s narrative text, credited to their Descriptive Bulletin No. 3 (copyright 1904). The text ends by calling the fight here one of the most brutal hand-to-hand struggles in modern warfare and the point where the Confederate advance northward was turned back. The title is repeated in French, German, Spanish, Swedish, and Russian. That shows Underwood sold these sets internationally.

Around 1900, stereo views were a major form of home education and entertainment, a kind of “virtual travel.” Underwood & Underwood sold numbered boxed sets with guidebooks and maps, so families could “tour” places like Gettysburg from their parlors. [jet][ph:L]

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