Camp Dennison: Seventy-Five Thousand Soldiers and a Raid

When Ohio governor William Dennison needed somewhere to train volunteers in the spring of eighteen sixty-one, Captain William Rosecrans chose this Little Miami River valley northeast of Cincinnati. The railroads made it ideal: men and supplies could move quickly. Between eighteen sixty-one and eighteen sixty-five, somewhere between seventy-five thousand and a hundred thousand Union soldiers mustered, trained, and shipped out from here.

The camp's military hospital grew to twenty-three hundred beds, one of the Union's largest. In July of eighteen sixty-three, barely six hundred partially armed men at the camp helped slow Confederate raider John Hunt Morgan's sweep through Ohio, with Morgan possessing more than two thousand well-armed cavalry. The camp closed when the war ended, leaving behind only a cemetery and the memory of a generation that passed through this valley.