During the battle and for weeks afterward, the Shaifer home served as a field hospital, with amputations performed on benches and tables on the porches around the house. Charles Dana, a former journalist observing the army for U.S. Secretary of War Stanton, first confronted such a bloody scene there. On June 13, weeks after the battle ended, neighbor Spooner Forbes wrote in his diary, "Loaned Mrs. Shaifer buggy to go to Jefferson after her children." The women of the household may have spent those intervening weeks cleaning and making the house habitable again for their families. Dana later recalled coming upon the little white house, taken as a field hospital, and seeing outside a heap of amputated arms and legs that gave him a vivid sense of war unlike anything he had previously experienced. At the Shaifer home, caring for small children amid the battle and its aftermath was especially traumatic, and the story of amputations lingered there for generations. Civil War battlefield surgery was relatively crude, and the high rate of infections caused many deaths after the fighting, as the technology for killing had far outpaced the technology for healing.
