Camp Ford: The Prison West of the Mississippi

A mile or two northeast of downtown Tyler, on ground that now holds a quiet county park, thousands of Union soldiers once endured one of the Civil War's most extreme conditions. Camp Ford was the largest Confederate prison camp west of the Mississippi River. The site began in eighteen sixty-two as a training facility for Confederate conscripts, named for Colonel John S.

Ford, a Texas Ranger and politician the men called Rip. When the Trans-Mississippi Department converted it to a prisoner facility in the summer of eighteen sixty-three, it received its first captives transferred from Shreveport, Louisiana. Over the following two years, roughly six thousand Union prisoners passed through its stockade.

At its peak, in July of eighteen sixty-four, more than five thousand three hundred men were confined on land that was never built to hold so many. Shelter was whatever prisoners could construct themselves, crude huts, dugouts, lean-tos from salvaged timber. Food was sparse; water grew foul.

The Confederate supply lines serving all of the Trans-Mississippi were stretched and unreliable, and the prison showed it. Of the approximately six thousand men held there, two hundred and eighty-six died. Camp Ford closed in mid-May of eighteen sixty-five, weeks after Lee's surrender in the east.

Historians note that conditions at Camp Ford, while grim, were somewhat better than at Andersonville in Georgia during the same period. But better is a relative word when men are dying of exposure and disease in a pine-woods stockade far from home. The original site is preserved today as a public park owned by Smith County and managed by the Smith County Historical Society, with interpretive markers describing the stockade's perimeter and the lives of those confined within it.