Existing comment:
A Blighted Landscape:
In 1866, a former Union doctor named Reed Bontecou led a small expedition to the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House battlefields to collect speciments for the army's medical collection. Along the way photographer G.O. Brown took photographs -- the first known postwar images taken of these battlefields.
Every tree seemed to be riddled with balls. Small arms, mostly broken or bent, strewed the ground, with every conceivable damaged article of accoutrement or clothing, and graces, filled with the dead of both armies, were fearfully frequent. Horses lay unburied. The stench of burning vegetable matter and clothing, and the gases steaming up through the thin covering of the graves, almost suffocated me in the hot, close air of the forest.
-- James E.J. Caldwell, 1st South Carolina
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