www.salisburyprison.com

Salisbury Confederate Military Prison exists today as a quiet historic site with one remaining small building and trenches holding the bodies of thousands of prisoners. The story of this military prison and its silent witnesses is the story of how things can get out of control during war, despite best intentions and charity by local civilians.

Salisbury,N.C. Was home to one of the Confederacy’s first military prisons, established to house Union prisoners in 1861. It began as a small and somewhat comfortable prison camp but as the war’s intensity increased the population swelled from 1,500 to 28,000. Inadequate food, poor water, lack of winter clothing and the diseases that spread among the prisoners resulted in many deaths. Finally individual burials were impossible, mass grave trenches were dug to bury the dead. They died with no marker of memorial, destined to be forgotten, mourned from a distance by home-bound family and friends.

Mass burials are the products of volume and immediacy. Neither side had the logistics of personnel to dedicate for prisoners, there were more immediate needs by their troops in the field. The only way to deal with the enemy’s dead in a nearly humane manner was to bury them quickly and mark the trench.
Today these mass graves memorialize in silence the sacrifice of soldiers past who served and fell for their causes. They deserve to honored and remembered.

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