As our rental car eased into Gettysburg, past the brick-and-plank storefronts selling tourist trinkets, women’s fashion, artisan tacos, funnel cakes, and free CBD samples, my imagination was running amok.

It’s hard to imagine how many were killed in this battle. I don’t want to imagine. I don’t want to envision 160,000 men fighting on the soil of Adams County, Pennsylvania.

I don’t want to visualize the fields of matted down grass, sticky with blood. Nor do I want to think about how historians say this town had an ever-present odor for years after the battle.

What I want to think about instead, is a woman named Lydia Hamilton Smith.

You did not learn about Lydia in school. You’ll probably never hear her name.

But she was a local here. Lydia was born on Valentine’s Day in a lowly tavern backroom, just up the road. Her mom was African American, her dad was Irish. You can just imagine how she was treated as a girl.

She married a free Black man named Jacob, and gave birth to two sons. Her husband died in 1852 and she became a single mom.

She found a good job as housekeeper for a well-to-do guy in town. Things were going well for her.

But then came the 1860s.

Lydia’s oldest son died. Her other son, Isaac, a banjo player, enlisted in the 6th US Colored Troops in 1863. He marched off to Virginia.

War takes everything. It takes everything from every-ONE. It’s hard to imagine living through a war on our own soil. It’s hard to imagine enemy fire, shattering the windows of your schoolhouses, chewing up the clapboards of your local church.

Modern Americans are insulated from such horrors. But our own Civil War wasn’t that long ago. Six or seven generations.

Lydia was probably in the house on the day the battle took place. It was early July, 87 degrees. Sunny. The main fighting happened on the outskirts of town. But the battle soon found its way into the town itself. Soldiers were seen running down mainstreets, mowed down and shot in the road.

Lydia could’ve fled. She could have left town like many others. Instead, she stayed.

And that brings me to an article I found.

The article was written by J. Howard Wert, who wrote for the Harrisburg Telegraph. Wert was a soldier who fought at Gettysburg. He was also a local boy.

And after the bloody battle, at the hospital, he met someone. Someone who stuck out in his memory. Even years after the war. He never forgot her. These are Wert’s words:

“She belonged to a downtrodden race… She was poor, yet she had a little money saved up, a trifle at a time, by years of labor.

“From a white neighbor she hired a ramshackle wagon with which she did hauling, and a horse [who] was a pile of bones, else probably he would not have been in Adams County at all but mounted by a Confederate cavalryman.

“Lydia circled widely through the farm section around Bendersville and York Springs…When she could get donations of delicacies and suitable clothing, she accepted them. When donations failed, she bought [them herself] till she had spent the very last penny of her little hoard…

“[Her] wagon was heaped high to its full capacity, and she turned toward the hospital miles away… And then Lydia, feeling no weariness from many miles of travel, began to distribute the articles she had brought—to Union soldiers [only], of course?

“No! The Union and Confederate lay side by side, and that noble woman saw [no differences] in the latter the warriors who were striving to perpetuate the slavery of her race. She saw only suffering humanity.”

Lydia single-handedly serviced tens of thousands of suffering soldiers. And when asked about it, her only response was:

“I thank the good Lord that put it in my heart to try to do something for these poor creatures.”

Look for the helpers.