The Tragic Story of Elmira — The North's Deadliest 30 Acres, and Fifteen Cents to Watch Men Die

Elmira, New York, in the summer of 1864. A Union recruiting depot on the Chemung River is converted into a prison camp for four to five thousand Confederate enlisted men. Within two months it holds nine thousand six hundred. Along the southern edge of the enclosure sits Foster's Pond, a standing pool the prisoners came to call the lagoon. The camp's latrines drain into it. The wells the men drink from are dug beside it. Nine hundred prisoners are still sleeping in tents on its bank at the end of August. Across Water Street, a local man builds an observation tower more than twice the height of the wall and hangs a placard on it: admission fifteen cents, refreshments served below. A rival platform goes up twenty feet taller and undercuts him at ten cents, furnished with chairs and field glasses. Booths beneath sell lemon pop, ginger cakes, beer and liquor. This is what the record makes knowable about the year. What a quarter of beef actually yielded once it was cut. How many men had scurvy by the eleventh of September. What the camp surgeon wrote to Washington, and how long the answers took. How ten men moved sixty six feet of earth with haversacks while the town refused to permit a drainage ditch. Of the 12,123 men assigned to Elmira, 2,963 died there. Nearly one in four. Reconstructed from the camp surgeon's reports, federal inspection reports, and the accounts of men who were held inside. Full source list below. SOURCES Michael Gray, The Business of Captivity: Elmira and Its Civil War Prison, Kent State University Press, 2001Anthony M. Keiley, In Vinculis; or, The Prisoner of War, 1866Eugene F. Sanger, Surgeon, report to Surgeon-General J. K. Barnes, November 1, 1864, reprinted in The Photographic History of the Civil War, volume 7, 1911Charles T. Alexander, Acting Medical Inspector, report on inspection of Barracks No. 3, Elmira, July 14, 1864Berry Benson, Berry Benson's Civil War Book: Memoirs of a Confederate Scout and Sharpshooter, edited by Susan Williams Benson, 1962Michael Horigan, "Elmira Prison Camp: A Second Opinion," Chemung County Historical Journal, https://www.angelfire.com/ny5/elmirap... E. Byrne, "Elmira's Civil War Prison Camp," Chemung County Historical Journal, https://www.angelfire.com/ny5/elmirap... Emerson, "The Elmira Prison Camp," AMEDD Historian, number 38, Summer 2022Clay W. Holmes, The Elmira Prison Camp: A History of the Military Prison at Elmira, N.Y., 1912Derek Maxfield, Hellmira: The Union's Most Infamous Civil War Prison Camp, Savas Beatie, 2020Military Images, "Capturing Elmira: The Photographers Who Documented a Northern Prisoner of War Camp," 2025, https://www.militaryimagesmagazine-di... Prison Camp 1864-1865 historical marker, Historical Marker Database, https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=32303