Camp Butler U.S.A. Hospital and Camp Hospital - Springfield, IL
Posted by: 
cldisme
N 39° 49.910 W 089° 33.407
16S E 281206 N 4412220
From 1861 until its destruction by fire in 1865, Camp Butler hospital tended to Union soldiers and Confederate POWs.
Waymark Code: WMA39E
Location: Illinois, United States
Date Posted: 11/09/2010
Views: 8
Sources:
- "
Camp Misery" Illinois Times, May 14, 2008
-
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1908-1984) Vol 14 No. 3/4
- "
Portals To Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War" by Lonnie R. Speer (1997) pages 136-137.
- Veteran's Administration
website
The first troops arrived at Camp Butler in August 1861 and by the end of the month, 5,000 men occupied the camp. Just two-and-a-half weeks after the camp opened, a soldier had died of "lung fever" according to the camp history. Camp leaders began to assemble a medical staff, including a surgeon, hospital steward, druggist, and nurses who had to be “plain women over the age of 30.”
In February 1862, approximately 2,000 Confederate soldiers captured when Fort Donelson was surrendered, arrived at Camp Butler. Sanitation facilities were primitive and the daily ration of food often consisted of little more than hard biscuits and a cup of thin coffee.
Because of the lack of basic supplies and medical necessities, the POWs began to die at a rapid rate almost immediately. The heat of the summer combined with the severe winter cold, as well as diseases such as smallpox, typhus and pneumonia, decimated the prisoner population. Roughly 700 POWs died in the smallpox epidemic of summer 1862.
Very little remains of the Camp Butler hospital since it and its records were destroyed in a fire in 1865 other than the occasional personal records of Dr. Thomas Madison Reece at the Medical Purveyors Office in Chicago (now part of the collection at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library) and the memoirs of the Surgeon in Charge Dr. William I. Kincade.
Today, Camp Butler is a National Cemetery with not only Union and Confederate graves (which are marked with a pointed-peak gravestone instead of the more familiar rounded one), but also soldiers from all the subsequent wars.