Private Wesley Culp of the 2nd Virginia Infantry was killed on or near Culp’s Hill at the Battle of Gettysburg on July 2, 1863. Culp was born in Gettysburg in 1839. A relative of his, Henry Culp, owned Culp’s Hill and the adjacent land, which the family had farmed since 1787. An apprentice carriage maker, Wesley Culp followed his employer to Shepherdstown, Virginia, in 1858, and there joined the local militia. Come 1861, he followed his fellow guardsmen, and not his family, by joining the Confederate army. (Wesley’s brother William joined the 87th Pennsylvania Infantry.) One of his officers, Henry Kyd Douglas, described Culp as “twenty-four years old and very little, if any, over five feet, and when captain of the company I procured a special gun for him.” He fought with that gun at Gettysburg and died with it. Various legends surround Culp – for instance, that Henry Culp was his father or perhaps his uncle. The historian Thomas A. Desjardin has argued that Henry Culp was, in fact, “a distant cousin he may scarcely have known.” This would make it less likely that Wesley spent summers playing on the fields where he was killed, as is often claimed.
Further Reading:
William Alan Blair and William Pencak, Making and Remaking Pennsylvania’s Civil War (2001)
Thomas A. Desjardin, These Honored Dead: How the Story of Gettysburg Shaped American Memory (2003)
This Vignette Provided By
Brendan Wolfe, associate editor of Encyclopedia Virginia
