Camp Hughes and the Measles That Killed

Just southwest of Gosport, along the White River, the Civil War touched this quiet ground. In the fall of eighteen sixty one the Union army raised a training camp here and named it Camp Hughes, for the former Indiana congressman James Hughes. It became the mustering ground for the Fifty Ninth Indiana Infantry, a Civil War camp in Owen County.

The men drilled here through the cold months, and then danger came not from a battlefield but from disease. In the final weeks before they marched out, an outbreak of measles swept the camp. According to the marker, soldiers died here of measles without ever seeing combat.

In February of eighteen sixty two the regiment left for the front. The camp is long gone, but a roadside marker remembers the young men who never made it past their first winter.