A boulder battlefield at Gettysburg
Sickles Avenue in Cumberland Township runs past Devil's Den, where on July 2, 1863, about 5,500 Confederates under John Bell Hood attacked roughly 2,400 Union defenders among the boulders. The First Texas Regiment broke through and seized the hill, General Hood was crippled by shell fragments, and nearly 1,500 men fell in the fighting there.
A feared snake gave the rocks their name before battle
Devil's Den is a jumble of huge gray boulders at the south end of Houck's Ridge, now preserved as a walkable part of Gettysburg National Military Park. Visitors climb the rocks, cross a stone bridge wedged between two of them, and read markers describing the fighting that happened right there.
The boulders formed 200 million years ago, when melted rock pushed up through the ground and hardened underground. Over millions of years, freezing and thawing split that rock into the cracked piles seen today. Long before the battle, locals already feared the place. They believed a huge snake, some said 15 feet long, lived in the crevices between the rocks. People called the snake "the Devil," and the name stuck to the hill itself.
On July 2, 1863, the quiet legend gave way to real violence. Confederate General John Bell Hood sent about 5,500 men from Texas, Alabama, Arkansas and Georgia against roughly 2,400 Union soldiers dug in around Devil's Den. Hood himself was hit early by shell fragments. His arm never fully worked again, and he had to leave the field.
The fighting was savage and close. Union gunners under Smith's battery fired six cannons from the hill, trying to hold the Confederates back. The First Texas Regiment pushed to the top anyway, capturing three of those guns. Georgia troops under General Henry Benning poured through a gap in the Union line soon after. By evening, Confederate sharpshooters had taken up positions in the rocks, picking off Union officers on Little Round Top across the valley.
Veterans, a trolley and a comfort station marked the hill
Union veterans came back to dedicate monuments. In 1884, the 124th New York Regiment placed a statue near Devil's Den honoring its dead. A trolley line reached the hill by 1894, carrying tourists in from town until 1916. A comfort station went up in 1933 for visitors; it stood until 2009, when the Park Service tore it down, though the footbridge it once served still crosses Plum Run.
The boulders were regraded to look like 1863 again
By 2022, generations of boots had worn the boulders smooth and cut trails into the soil around them. The National Park Service closed Devil's Den for six months that year, regrading paths and replanting ground to look more like it did in 1863. It reopened that September. Visitors now climb the same rocks the First Texas Regiment fought over, cross the stone bridge wedged between two boulders, and read markers naming the units that bled there. Cannons still point from the crest, where Smith's battery once fired down into the attack.
The boulders Hood's men climbed under fire are still there to climb, worn smooth by a century and a half of visitors.
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