Newnan: The Hospital City of the Confederacy

By the summer of eighteen sixty-three, the Confederate armies were hemorrhaging men faster than the medical system could handle. The railroads that the Confederacy depended on for supplying armies also made certain towns logical collection points for the wounded. Newnan, Georgia, at the junction of the Atlanta and West Point Railroad, became one of the largest.

The town had been founded in eighteen twenty-eight on land ceded by Creek Chief William McIntosh in the Treaty of Indian Springs three years earlier. It was named for Daniel Newnan, a Georgia soldier and statesman. By the time the Civil War began, it was a prosperous county seat with grand antebellum homes, more than twenty of which still stand in five National Register Historic Districts, surrounded by cotton plantations and served by the railroad that connected Atlanta to the Alabama state line.

The railroad made it useful to the Confederacy. The Confederate medical corps established seven field hospitals in Newnan: Bragg, Buckner, Foard, Gamble, College Temple, Coweta House, and Pinson's Springs. The first surgical teams arrived in eighteen sixty-three. As the casualty lists from the Atlanta Campaign mounted through the summer of eighteen sixty-four, the hospitals filled beyond capacity. Schools were converted to wards. Churches became operating theaters. Private homes opened their parlors to the dying. Eventually every public building in Newnan was serving the wounded.

More than ten thousand Confederate sick and injured passed through the town's seven hospitals. Roughly two hundred Union soldiers wounded at the nearby Battle of Brown's Mill, fought in July of eighteen sixty-four three miles south of town, were also treated here alongside their enemies.

Because Newnan's railroad junction gave it military value, Sherman's forces did not destroy it. The town survived the war largely intact, which is why those antebellum homes still stand on the square today, a rare artifact of the Old South that exists in part because the Confederacy needed its hospital beds.