Confederate Prison Camp — Blackshear, Georgia

Here stood a Confederate prison camp that held more than five thousand Union prisoners of war from mid November through mid December of eighteen sixty-four. The camp was established around the middle of November, eighteen sixty-four, as Confederate authorities scrambled to relocate prisoners out of the path of Sherman's March to the Sea. Men transferred here from Millen and other overcrowded Georgia stockades arrived in desperate condition after months of captivity.

The site near Blackshear was remote and poorly supplied. Prisoners endured exposure, disease, and starvation in the open pine-barren landscape of southeastern Georgia. The camp operated for only about one month before the men were dispersed again.

It represents a little-remembered chapter in the catastrophic network of Confederate prisoner-of-war facilities in Georgia during the final year of the Civil War.