This is a multi-cache describing one of the civilian stories of the Battle of Gettysburg. NOTE - The cache may not be accessible if there is snow on the ground.
First stop
The first two buildings at the corner of Baltimore St. and Breckenridge St. are the Tillie Pierce House (now a B&B) and the George Shriver house (now a museum). On July 1, 1863 the Confederate army was approaching the town of Gettysburg, and many of the civilians decided to flee town for safety. Henrietta Shriver (nee Weikert) was one such example. Her husband was away at war, so she decided to take her two daughters to her father's farm outside of town. The father of the Pierce family was also away at war, so Henrietta asked Mrs. Pierce if she could take the Pierce's 15-year-old daughter Tillie with her. Henrietta, Tillie, and the two Shriver girls set out on foot for the Jacob Weikert Farm.
You will need two pieces of information from this stop (no need to enter the buildings) to find and open the cache at the Jacob Weikert Farm.
1. The date when the Pierce house was built is the 4-digit combination to the lock on the cache
2. The third digit (X) and first digit (Y) of the street number of the Pierce house replace the X and Y in the coordinates of the cache
N 39 47.2536 W 77 XY.833
Final stop
Enter the driveway and immediately turn left and park on the gravel area in front of the barn. Find the cache and use the combination from the first stop to open it. (Note - The cache is not in the stone wall to the south of the barn (it marks the boundary of land owned by the Gettysburg National Military Park.) When done, please reset the combination to some random numbers.
Mrs. Shriver thought she would be safe at her father's farm which stands at the back side of Little Round Top. She could hardly have been more wrong. The farm soon became a field hospital, eventually treating almost 1000 soldiers. Tillie was forced into duty, helping tend to the wounded soldiers. She didn't return home until July 7th.
Later in life Tillie wrote a book about her experiences during the battle, "At Gettysburg: or What a Girl Saw and Heard of the Battle". It is one of the best-known civilian stories of Gettysburg and is available at stores throughout town.
The stone farmhouse, the barn, and the carriage house all date to before the Civil War. The floors in the dining room bear the stains of the blood from surgeries that were performed here. Many Union soldiers were temporarily buried in the back yard, and some Confederate soldiers were buried in the field across the road.