Union Prisoner of War Camp

Q-6-63

A transit prisoner of war camp for Union soldiers opened near here in June 1862 with the arrival of more than 2,000 men captured during the Shenandoah Valley Campaign. Lynchburg, at the confluence of three railroad lines, was an ideal location for such a facility. During the operation of the Dix-Hill Cartel, a system of prisoner exchange in effect from July 1862 until July 1863, soldiers held here were paroled near Richmond. Later, prisoners were sent to camps farther south. Officers were housed in empty factories in the city, and many prisoners were treated in local military hospitals. Most of those who died were buried in the City Cemetery and reinterred elsewhere after the war.

Department of Historic Resources, 2022

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References/Bibliographic Citation:

The War of the Rebellion, ser. II, vols. 4, 6, 7, 8. Clifton W. Potter, “A Forgotten Entrance to Hell: The Lynchburg Prisoner of War Camp, 1862–1865,” Lynch’s Ferry (Spring/Summer 2014): 20-28. Alice DuPuy Spencer, “I Even Remember Where the Mud Puddles Were” (typescript). John Worrell Northrop, Chronicles from the Diary of a War Prisoner in Andersonville and Other Military Prisons of the South in 1864 (Wichita, 1904), 42–45. J.V. Hadley, Seven Months a Prisoner (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898), 52-55. Peter W. Houck, A Prototype of a Confederate Hospital Center in Lynchburg, Virginia (Lynchburg: Warwick House Publishing, 1986). Frank S. Reader, History of the Fifth West Virginia Cavalry (New Brighton, PA, 1890). Charles A. Humphreys, Field, Camp, Hospital and Prison in the Civil War, 1863-1865 (Boston: Press of Geo. H. Ellis Co., 1918). “Data on Union Soldiers who died as Prisoners of War in Lynchburg, 1861-1865,” typescript. Roger Pickenpaugh, Captives in Blue: The Civil War Prisons of the Confederacy (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2013).