Camp Moore, Louisiana

Camp Moore in Tangipahoa, Louisiana was the largest Confederate training and staging camp in the Deep South, established in the summer of eighteen sixty-one to receive and equip the volunteers flooding in from across Louisiana after secession. It was named for Louisiana Governor Thomas Overton Moore and processed tens of thousands of soldiers in the first two years of the war before they shipped north toward Shiloh, Vicksburg, and the Virginia campaigns. A Confederate cemetery on the grounds holds the remains of soldiers who died here of disease, which killed far more men in Civil War camps than combat did. The site is now a small museum and cemetery on state-owned land and run by a historical association, preserving the story of the men who passed through, many of them young farmers who had never traveled more than thirty miles from home before the railroad brought them to this pine-woods camp and the war took them away.