Jennie Wade

Wade was born in Gettysburg, and worked as a seamstress with her mother in their house on Breckenridge Street while her father was in a mental asylum.

She may have been engaged to Johnston Hastings "Jack" Skelly, a corporal in the 87th Pennsylvania, who had been wounded two weeks earlier in the Battle of Winchester.

They temporarily buried Wade's body in the back yard of the McClellan house, in a coffin originally intended for the Confederate General William Barksdale.

[7] In 1882, the United States Senate voted to grant Wade's mother a pension, citing that her daughter had been killed serving the Union cause – baking bread for the soldiers.

A monument to her, designed by Gettysburg resident Anna M. Miller, was erected in 1900 that includes an American flag that flies around the clock.

Jennie Wade
Early 1900s photograph of Jennie Wade's house