Warehouses to Prisons – Civil War Prisons in Danville

He sits on the floor in a corner of the Danville Museum. Not a real man, but a representation of the approximately 7,000 men imprisoned in Danville in the 1800s. A few streets over from the museum, 1,312 small white headstones mark the graves of men who died in those prisons. It wasn’t their choice to be there.  Neither was it the choice of the citizens of Danville to have six empty tobacco warehouses converted to prisons for captured Union soldiers.

Danville 1860

Danville was a quiet town sitting above the banks of the Dan River. With more than 3,000 citizens, it was quite prosperous thanks to the tobacco industry, as attested by the numerous warehouses. There was both a male and female academy dedicated to higher learning; more than one bank; several businesses, and plenty of food for everyone. The railroad to Richmond provided a way to move the tobacco north where it found willing buyers. It was a pleasant life in a beautiful place filled with homes and churches.

But, by late 1863, that was just a memory as a new reality had set in.

Danville 1863

The advent of the Civil War brought about this new reality. Most of the tobacco warehouses were empty; there were food shortages; the population had more than doubled, and more people were headed to Danville. People in the surrounding countryside who had been displaced by the war sought shelter and substance in Danville. Prices of goods had skyrocketed by as much as 300 percent and shortages, especially of coffee and sugar, began to occur.  Most of the men had gone off to be soldiers and the times had become dire. The decision had been made to send Union prisoners of war housed in Richmond south to Danville. In the period from 1863 to 1865, some 7,000 men were sent to be imprisoned here. 

From Warehouses to Prisons

“The tobacco warehouse might have made a fairly comfortable abiding place if it had been properly fitted and cared for.  But the glass was broken from many of the windows, and Danville lies high enough to give many cold days and still many colder nights in the months of winter…” according to A Prisoner of War in Virginia 1864-1865 by George H. Putnam. The book was written 48 years after his release from Danville prison.

In 1863, the decision was made to transport captured Union soldiers from prisons in Richmond to Danville. This decision was made for the security of the capital of the Confederacy and to bring a measure of relief to the overcrowding of prisons there. The prisoners sent from Richmond were housed in six vacant warehouses. Four of these faced each other on the corners of Union and Spring Streets. Prison number 5 was found on the corner of Floyd and High Streets, and number 6 was found a short distance from the others at the corner of Loyal and Lynn Streets.

These were hastily cleared of any contents. Each floor of each building was equipped with a single pot-bellied coal-burning stove as the only source of heat, and the floor served as beds for all. The floors were encrusted with layers of dirt from the warehouse days and grew worse with the overcrowded conditions.

Those first prisoners expecting better conditions in Danville were soon disappointed and found themselves in worse conditions. Rats, lice, cold, and scarcity of food added to their misery. Somehow, perhaps through one of the prisoners, there was an outbreak of smallpox in the prisons.

After this, the fear of the spread of the disease to the town’s population, and increased escape attempts, prisoners were no longer housed on the first floor of any of the buildings. 

Fearing a spread of the disease to the town, officials petitioned to have the prisoners removed from Danville.These apparently fell on deaf ears in Richmond, but soon a smallpox hospital area composed of tents was set up across the river and away from the town. This proved to be one bright spot as this area was cleaner, more sanitary, and better equipped than the six prisons.

Karen Lynne Byrne wrote in her master’s thesis in 1993: “The selection of Danville as a prison site was indicative of the weaknesses that plagued the Confederate prison system. A lack of planning and forethought accompanied the decision to establish a compound in Danville.”

Later she also states, “The history of the prisons was intertwined with that of the town and, in the larger sense, the history of the Confederacy. The prisons did not exist as a separate entity. Instead, they were part of the larger Danville community. Living conditions inside the compound often reflected the standards that existed in the town.  Union prisoners and Danville civilians alike suffered the consequences of war…”.

So why this story? 

This story is the result of a mistake. In researching old newspapers and other online sources for previous stories about Danville places, I thought I found mention of Walt Whitman visiting the city in 1865 to retrieve his brother George, who had been imprisoned here since 1863. The romantic dreamer, reader, and teacher that I am was thrilled to learn that one of my literary idols had once been so close by. Already enamored by Danville and its past, I wanted to know more. My romantic self envisioned buildings that were once places of much suffering reclaimed and transformed into luxury living quarters, commercial enterprises, and fine eating places bringing from a dire past rebirth and renewal. But more importantly, I could walk some of the same streets that Walt Whitman walked and perhaps capture some of the spirit he must have left there. 

I found that five of the six buildings were no longer standing, and the remaining structure had been vacant for some time. Walt Whitman never came to Danville, and his brother left Danville on a train to Annapolis, where he was reunited with his family.

Much More to the Story

In working on this story, I found something much more valuable than I had started out looking for. I found a passage to the past with a great deal of information available at my fingertips about something I knew next to nothing at all about.  Until, that is, a bit of misinformation came my way. Many of the things I found were personal accounts of the men who lived through this time. In all my years of teaching American history, I have been ignorant of things in my own backyard. That is why I want to share some of the sources that I found in hopes that your interest has been piqued enough to read more on your own.  It is not a pretty story, but it is an important one that contains lessons for us all.  

James L. Robertson, Jr.’s Houses of Horror: Danville’s Civil Wars Prisons was published in the Virginia Magazine of History & Biography in July 1961. It was one of the first stories to appear calling attention to the prisons in Danville. It can be read online at https://www.jstor.org/stable/4246764?seq=1 

Click on the website https://virginiahistory.org/ and then on the “research” tab to search the collection of documents, or  https://babel.hathitrust.org and enter Danville Confederate prisons in the search box.  This will take you to a list of first-hand accounts from prisons and reports of conditions in the prison, and many other interesting accounts.  Other great websites include https://collections.library.cornell.edu/moa_new/index.html,  https://www.victorianvilla. com/sims-mitchell/local/articles/,  and https://oldwestendva.com/blog/.

This story and the sources above can give information, but if you go and see the remaining building from the outside that so many men were housed and died in; read the marker on the street and the writing posted on the wall, and then travel up the street to the cemetery with its rows of white headstones, you will get more than information.  You can feel and know why it is important to remember and honor.