Camp Ford

Camp Ford
Location	Tyler, Texas
Coordinates	32°23′44.13″N 95°16′07.28″W / 32.3955917°N 95.2686889°W / 32.3955917; -95.2686889Coordinates: 32°23′44.13″N 95°16′07.28″W / 32.3955917°N 95.2686889°W / 32.3955917; -95.2686889
Established	1996
Governing body	Smith County Historical Society
Location of Camp Ford in Texas

Camp Ford was a prisoner of war camp near Tyler, Texas, during the American Civil War. It was the largest Confederate-run prison west of the Mississippi River.

Established in the spring of 1862 as a training camp for new Confederate recruits, the camp was named for Col. John Salmon Ford, a Texas Ranger and the Superintendent of Conscripts for the State of Texas. The first Union prisoners to arrive at camp Ford in August 1863 included officers captured in Brashear City Louisiana in June, and included naval personnel captured when the 'Queen Of The West' and the 'Diana' were seized by the Union Navy. The captives were initially held in the open, but a panic ensued in November 1863 when 800 new prisoners threatened a mass breakout. A military enclosing 4 acres (16,000 m²) was soon erected.

With over 2,000 new prisoners taken in Louisiana on April 8 and 9 1864, at the battles of Mansfield, and Pleasant Hill, the stockade was quadrupled in size. Among those imprisoned there following these battles were 17 members of the 47th Pennsylvania Infantry, the only regiment from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to fight in the Union's 1864 Red River Campaign across Louisiana and the only regiment from the Keystone State to have men imprisoned at Camp Ford.

With more prisoners captured in Arkansas, the prison's population peaked at about 5,000 in July 1864. The population was reduced by exchanges in July and October 1864, and again in February 1865. The last 1,761 prisoners were exchanged on May 22, 1865.

Summary Executions of Local Citizens, Recounted by 49th Ohio prisoners at Camp Ford: From "Twenty Months in the Dept of the Gulf", A.G.H. DuGanne "Among the last-mentioned local events, however, was the "Match Plot," which deserves a paragraph".

"The breaking out of fires in several stores, at Tyler and other places, awakened a suspicion that two merchants from the Northern States, (who had purchased patent matches, which ignited almost spontaneously,) were incendiaries". "The usual senseless hue and cry followed; the traders were thrown into prison; and hundreds of hapless blacks were arrested and tortured -- in order to get evidence of the "Yankee Conspiracy." "Free negros and poor white settlers from the North fell under the ban at once. Scores of the latter were hanged by the mob". "More than a hundred negros, free and bond, were executed, as I have been informed, on suspicion alone". "Several were burned at the stake". "Thirty white and free men were lynched, in and about Tyler and Palestine; one of the unfortunate merchants who had introduced the matches undergoing this fate -- the other escaping by timely flight". "Blood flowed in all quarters, till the enlightened "Regulators," finding no more poor whites to kill or banish, decided that "order reigned" again".