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 "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, Barksdale's and Wofford's Confederate brigades charged from the west directly into the Peach Orchard. Graham's Union brigade, with the 3rd ME & 3rd MI, "held the peach orchard until nearly dusk"; and at "6:30 p.m., McLaws' Division [broke] Birney's line at the Peach Orchard".[http://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?MarkerID=12998] The 21st Mississippi Infantry Regiment passed through the Peach Orchard toward Bigelow's 9th Massachusetts Battery farther east, also outflanking the 2nd New Hampshire, threatening it to be cut off from the rest of the Union, forcing them to retreat.<!--Pfanz' citation 24-->
The 2nd NH entered the Battle of Gettysburg with 353 soldiers. In under three hours, 47 were killed, 136 wounded and 36 men went missing; of the 24 officers, only three were not killed or wounded.
Postbellum
Franklin Dullin Briscoe's artwork, Peach Orchard – Gettysburg, is now in the National Archives; (several Peach Orchard memorials were erected during the memorial association era--e.g., 68th Pennsylvania Infantry in 1886). Battlefield landscape preservation began in 1883 when peach trees were replanted in the orchard, and in 1896 a cast iron site identification marker was added near the road intersection. and exhibited 6 "Army of the Potomac" cannon by 1912. The Camp Eisenhower YCC participants replaced the orchard's peach trees in 1974, the orchard's ID tablet by Emmor Cope was entered-documented as an historic district contributing structure in 2004,