A long-standing mystery connected to a Bible ransacked from the Gettysburg Lutheran Seminary during the last days of the1863 battle has finally been solved.
According to museum Director of Education and Interpretation Codie Eash, his investigation traced the identity of a Confederate soldier whose handwritten inscription puzzled historians for nearly a century.
The story begins in the chaotic days after the Battle of Gettysburg. Samuel Simon Schmucker, President of the Lutheran Theological Seminary and a prominent abolitionist, fled town as Confederate forces approached. When he returned after the fighting, his home and library had been ransacked. Books, pamphlets, and papers were strewn across the yard; at least one appeared to have been partially burned.
Among the damaged belongings was Schmucker’s personal Bible.
At some point during or after the occupation of Seminary Ridge, a Confederate soldier retrieved the Bible from the debris and placed it back on a bookcase. Inside the front cover, he left a handwritten note signed “J.G. Bearden.”
The soldier wrote, in imperfect grammar: “This is the Holy Bible I pick up out of the [yard] and has placed on the case.” Beneath that, Schmucker later added his own pencil comment: that the note was “written by an illiterate but I trust pious Rebel during the sacking of my home and library during the great Battle of Gettysburg.”
For decades, the identity of “J.G. Bearden” remained an unresolved question in Gettysburg lore.
“For a very long time, going back to at least 1926, people tried to figure out who J.G. Bearden was,” Eash said in a recent interview at the museum. “Even with modern tools like Fold3, the National Park Service’s Soldiers and Sailors Database, and Ancestry.com, we just couldn’t come up with anybody by that identity.”
The began to break a little more than a year ago, Eash said, while museum staff were researching newly loaned artifacts at the Seminary’s Wentz Library across the street from the museum.
“We came up with some other pamphlets that were also written in by Confederate soldiers,” Eash said. “While I was transcribing these … I realized that most of them, if they were dated at all, were dated July 4.”
That observation led him to examine Confederate regimental rosters present in Gettysburg on July 4, 1863, particularly those of Georgia Brig. Gen. George Doles. In the 44th Georgia Infantry’s register, he found Judson G. Bearden, whose signature on an 1898 Georgia pension record later proved to be “basically a perfect match” with the handwriting in Schmucker’s Bible.
“The final Bearden realization came just a couple months ago in December 2025,” said Eash. “We were finally, after all that time, able to solve the problem.”
He added that while much about Bearden’s life remains unclear, records indicate he was born around 1829, enlisted in March 1862, was wounded at least once, later captured and paroled, and likely lived into the early 1910s.
The discovery has also opened the door to solving a second mystery: Identifying another Confederate soldier who signed himself “Surgeon, CSA” on one of the pamphlets recovered from Schmucker’s library.
“I don’t have a definitive answer yet, but I think I’m about 80 percent of the way there,” Eash said, suggesting the writer may have been Dr. Abner McGarity, a Georgia physician attached to the same regiment. “I need to do a little more work comparing handwriting.”
Beyond the detective work, the interview highlighted a busy season ahead for the Seminary Ridge Museum & Education Center.
Staff are preparing for their annual Winter Symposium at the end of February, co-sponsoring a Daniel Alexander Payne event with the Seminary next week, and hosting a series of winter “happy hours” on Zoom. Planning is also underway with the National Park Service for America’s 250th anniversary in 2026.
“We have lots of irons in the fire,” Eash said, adding that the 250th will likely bring national attention and more visitors to Gettysburg.
The museum recently rotated its gallery exhibits, sending about 40 artifacts back into storage and bringing in roughly 100 new loaned items, including the pamphlets that helped crack the Bearden case.
“We knew of the Bible for years,” Eash said. “But for these smaller pamphlets it might have been the first time in a hundred years anyone had opened them.”
