Getting Smithed at the “Dead House”
by adminIn December of 1861 an empty cotton factory in Salisbury became a prison to house Northern prisoners of war. It was a brick building that stood three stories high with several cottages and outbuildings. One of these outbuildings was a blacksmith shop, which would later be known as “The Dead House’. The Confederate soldiers built a stockade around the property and guard platforms transforming the cotton factory into the Salisbury Confederate Prison. It was originally only suppose to house approximately 2,500 prisoners of war but by 1864 it became overran with more than 10,000 men. The conditions became barbaric with overcrowding, starvation and death. The death toll rose daily as hundreds of men would die everyday. Before the prison became overran, deaths were held with dignity and a proper burial on prison grounds. When the death rate became out of control, mass burial took effect. The dead and near dead would be taken to the blacksmith shop now known as the “Dead House’. They would be stripped of their clothing, loaded onto wagons and buried in a trench with other dead bodies in an abandoned cornfield nearby. Some estimate than more than 11,000 men may be buried in those trenches.