Camp Curtin: Three Hundred Thousand Soldiers

The neighborhood around you today is residential, tightly packed rowhouses on a grid of streets named for the Union officers who drilled here. But in the spring of eighteen sixty-one this eighty-acre parcel was the Dauphin County Agricultural Fairgrounds. Within days of the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, Pennsylvania's governor mobilized the state, and this ground became Camp Curtin, named for Governor Andrew Curtin, who would spend the war years sending young men south.

It officially opened on April eighteenth, eighteen sixty-one. Major Joseph Knipe oversaw the first muster. By summer, newspapers were reporting that it took twenty tons of cooked provisions every single day just to feed the men training here. As the war expanded, so did the camp. It grew to include not only training grounds but a hospital, a supply depot, and at times a prisoner of war enclosure.

By the time Camp Curtin closed on November eleventh, eighteen sixty-five, the same date that would become Veterans Day after the First World War, more than three hundred thousand soldiers had passed through these fields. That figure is not a rounding. It is the best-documented count of any Union training facility in the country, and it makes Camp Curtin the largest Federal training camp of the entire Civil War.

The men who mustered here went to every major theater of the conflict. They fought at Antietam and at Gettysburg, at Cold Harbor and in the Shenandoah Valley. Pennsylvania sent more soldiers to the Union army than any state except New York, and the great funnel for most of them ran right through these streets.

A statue of Governor Curtin stands in a small park nearby, and a school bears the camp's name. The fairground vanished long ago under the city's northward growth. But the scale of what happened here, three hundred thousand departures, most of them young men who had never been away from home, settles over the neighborhood like weather you can feel but not quite see.