Jennie Wade: Gettysburg's Only Civilian Killed, Shot While Kneading Dough

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Mary Virginia Wade, known as Jenny though her signatures show she preferred Ginnie, was 20 in July 1863 and lived on Breckenridge Street in Gettysburg with her mother, both working as seamstresses while her father was confined to an asylum. Popular accounts call her engaged to childhood friend Corporal Johnston Hastings Jack Skelly of the 87th Pennsylvania, wounded at Winchester, but the only surviving wartime letter between them is platonic. When the battle began on July 1, Jenny, her mother and two younger brothers moved to her sister Georgia McClellan's house at 548 Baltimore Street to help with Georgia's newborn.

The McClellan house sat in the crossfire and took over 150 bullet strikes. Around 8 a.m. on July 3, while Jenny kneaded bread dough in the kitchen, a Minié ball passed through two wooden doors, struck her left shoulder blade, went through her heart and stopped in her corset. Union soldiers sheltering upstairs buried her in the backyard in a coffin made for Confederate General William Barksdale. The next day her mother baked 15 loaves from the same dough. Whether the shot came from a Confederate sharpshooter or a stray round cannot be proven.

Skelly died on July 12 without learning of her death.
She was reburied at the German Reformed Church in January 1864 and in Evergreen Cemetery, near Skelly, in November 1865.
In 1882 the Senate granted her mother a pension, citing Jenny as baking bread for Union soldiers.
Her 1900 monument, designed by Anna M. Miller, flies a flag 24 hours a day, an honor shared by the Betsy Ross House.
Elderly Ephraim Whisler died of a heart attack after a shell burst over his house, and children were later killed by unexploded shells.

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