DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Picture yourself standing in Cherokee County, Texas — quiet enough now, but in the spring of 1864, this ground was anything but. The marker at this site takes us back to one of the Civil War's lesser-told chapters, and it's a story worth knowin'.
It starts not in Texas, but in Louisiana — Mansfield, to be precise. April 8, 1864. That's the day Federal forces ran headlong into Confederate resistance as part of the Red River Campaign, a push aimed at preventing a Federal invasion of Texas.
More than three thousand Union soldiers were captured at Mansfield that day. Three thousand men, taken prisoner in a single engagement. Now, the Confederacy had to put them somewhere.
And some of those men — some of those more than three thousand captured at Mansfield — ended up right here, at this site in Cherokee County. Let that land for a moment. Men who had marched and fought through Louisiana found themselves held on Texas soil, far from home, far from anything familiar.
And this site wasn't even the largest operation the Confederacy was running in the state. That distinction belonged to Camp Ford, up at Tyler — the largest prisoner of war camp west of the Mississippi River. The whole Mississippi.
That is a considerable piece of geography to be the largest of anything. Texas was running two other camps as well — one at Hempstead, over in Waller County, and another at Camp Verde, out in Kerr County. So across the state, the machinery of wartime captivity was turning.
Cherokee County was one spoke in that wheel. It's a quiet place to carry such a heavy history.
What the marker says
At this site. Housed some of the more than 3,000 Federals captured at Mansfield, LA., on April 8, 1864, in Red River Campaign to prevent Federal invasion of Texas. Camp Ford, at Tyler, was largest P.O.W. camp west of the Mississippi. Texas had two others, at Hempstead, Waller County, and Camp Verde, Kerr County. (1965)