A Village Full of Wounded Men

<i>Entering a little clearing, we discovered the yellow hospital flags fluttering from the gables of every house in the hamlet of Leetown, and the surgeons busy with the sad, yet humane task that was theirs to perform.</i><br>Lyman G. Bennett, private, 36th Illinois Infantry Regiment<br><br>The quarter-mile-long trail you see ahead leads to the site of Leetown, Arkansas. Today the woods and meadows of the Pea Ridge battlefield appear to be an uninhabited wilderness. During the Civil War, this whole area was a patchwork quilt of working farms and woodlots. Leetown was made up of a dozen or so long-and-frame homes and outbuildings.<br><br>As intense fighting ranged nearby in Oberson's cornfield and Morgan's Woods, stretcher bearers carried the wounded of both armies to Leetown, the closest place offering shelter from the winter weather. All the space in the houses was taken over by injured and dying soldiers. Yellow flags guided the walking wounded to medical attention.<br><br>This 1862 illustration from <i>Harper's Weekly</i> magazine shows Union surgeons working in a combat aid station very similar to those set up in the houses here. No Civil War-era drawing that shows Leetown is known to exist. Battlefield artists did not follow the armies that fought in Arkansas in 1862.<br><br>Today no structure remains in the clearing where Leetown once was.