Dedicated: September 1, 1889.
Location: Located at the foot of the steps of the Christ Lutheran Church on Chambersburg Street in Gettysburg where Rev. Horatio Howell was killed.
Description: Erected by the Survivors Association of the 90th Pennsylvania Volunteers and friends of Rev. Horatio S. Howell. Composed of open bronze book with narrative inscription, resting on a lectern of polished red granite. 4′ high, tablet, 1’8″ x 2′. Lectern’s granite post is supported by a base of Gettysburg granite on which the bronze dedicatory tablet is mounted. An open book on a circular pedestal set within church steps.
The inscription reads:
In Memoriam.
Rev. Horatio S. Howell
Chaplain.
90th Penn’a Vols,
was cruelly shot
dead on these
church steps on
the afternoon of
July 1st 1863
About Reverend Horatio Howell
Horatio Stockton Howell was born on August 14, 1820. He was a Presbyterian Church minister in the small hamlet of Delaware Water Gap in northeastern Pennsylvania. On July 1, medical personnel of the I Corps selected the College Lutheran Church at #44 Chambersburg Street as a divisional field hospital. Late in the afternoon, the Confederates began to push the Union troops back through town. Shortly after 4 PM, the overwhelmed soldiers of the First and Eleventh Corps fell back through the streets of Gettysburg to the heights on Cemetery Ridge and Cemetery Hill south of town. Chaplain Howell was assisting members of the medical staff inside the building; upon hearing shots outside, Howell turned to a nearby surgeon and said, “I will step outside for a moment and see what the trouble is.”
Sgt. Archibald Snow followed Howell out of the church door and wrote the most detailed account of what happened:
I had just had my wound dressed and was leaving through the front door just behind Chaplain Howell, at the same time when the advance skirmishers of the Confederates were coming up the street on a run. Howell, in addition to his shoulder straps & uniform, wore the straight dress sword prescribed in Army Regulations for chaplains… The first skirmisher arrived at the foot of the church steps just as the chaplain and I came out. Placing one foot on the first step the soldier called on the chaplain to surrender; but Howell, instead of throwing up his hands promptly and uttering the usual ‘I surrender,’ attempted some dignified explanation to the effect that he was a noncombatant and as such was exempt from capture, when a shot from the skirmisher’s rifle ended the controversy… The man who fired the shot stood on the exact spot where the memorial tablet has since been erected, and Chaplain Howell, fell upon the landing at the top of the steps.
Howell was the only chaplain killed during the battle of Gettysburg. He was buried in Brooklyn’s Green-wood Cemetery.