Salisbury Prison: North Carolina's Deadliest Civil War Camp

In eighteen sixty-one the Confederate government needed a prison, and North Carolina offered a former cotton factory in Salisbury. The Salisbury Prison opened that July, and in its early months conditions were relatively humane. Union prisoners played baseball, performed in theatrical productions, and waited out the war in something resembling order.

That changed in the fall of eighteen sixty-four, when the prisoner population swelled from the designed capacity of two thousand five hundred to more than ten thousand men. Disease, starvation, and exposure killed thousands. The Federal government acquired the makeshift burial grounds in eighteen sixty-eight and designated Salisbury National Cemetery two years later. It holds the largest proportion of unknown burials of any national cemetery in the United States, a testament to how catastrophically the system collapsed in those final desperate months. More than eleven thousand soldiers are honored here, most of them nameless.