On day one of the Battle of Gettysburg, as the tide turned against the desperately outnumbered Union fighters, Northern officers on the Federals right flank threw in reinforcements to help cover the 11th Corps retreat to Cemetery Hill. This modest marker rests upon the site where, several days later, a Gettysburg civilian found a then anonymous Union soldier, a casualty of that fighting on July 1, 1863. Unable to determine his identity, the only clue was a photograph he had clutched in his now cold hands, apparently the last thing upon which he gazed before succumbing to his fatal wounds.

The publication of this picture, which was of three small children, created an uproar in the north as a touched populace attempted to identify this unknown family man. Eventually a Mrs. Phylinda Humiston recognized the little ones as her own darling children, Frank, Frederick, and Alice. It was in this manner that she came to know that her husband, Sergeant Amos Humiston of the 154th New York, had lost his life on the bloody fields of Gettysburg. He would later be laid to rest aside thousands of his comrades in the Gettysburg National Cemetery, ironically located on the hill that, had he reached it, would have given him shelter that day. In response to this heart-wrenching story, donations from sympathetic Unionists throughout the country helped to found a Soldier's Orphan's Home in Gettysburg shortly after wars end in 1866. [C]