After the Battle of Shiloh, Tennessee, on April 6 and 7, 1862, the Confederate government selected Macon as a Federal prisoner-of-war camp site, using the Macon Fair and Parade Grounds to incarcerate 900 prisoners later that spring. Named for James Oglethorpe, Georgia's founder, Camp Oglethorpe encompassed fifteen acres surrounded by a 12-foot-high wooden fence with an outside walk for sentries, and two 12-pounder cannon were positioned to sweep the site. Ten feet inside the stockade wall ran a line of boards nailed to posts, and guards were ordered to shoot any prisoner approaching this "deadline." Numerous wooden-framed structures included a hospital, doctor's shop, and cook house, while a spring ran through the camp and a well supplied drinking water. Prisoners were allowed to build shelters from scrap lumber and other materials, and for distraction they shot marbles, tossed horseshoes, made bone jewelry, and sometimes sold or traded their wares for extra food or clothing. New arrivals during 1862 raised the prison population to between 1,200 and 1,400 men, almost a quarter of whom were ill or wounded, prompting the prison surgeon, Dr. James B. Hinkle, to ask Macon citizens to send old mattresses, coverlets, bagging, and carpeting for the hospital. A ridge southwest of the camp was used for prisoner burials. During the Atlanta Campaign in 1864, a new prison for Federal enlisted men opened at Andersonville, forty miles south of Macon, and Camp Oglethorpe was then principally reserved for officers. In the last year of the war, Macon was overwhelmed with thousands of wounded Confederate soldiers and refugees, worsening shortages of medicine, food, clothing, and shelter in the camp. Luther G. Billings of the 3rd New York Cavalry described the prisoners as ragged, unwashed and unshaven, with dirty rags barely covering them and with unhealed wounds and sores. On July 31, 1864, Federal cavalry commanded by Major General George M. Stoneman was defeated and captured at Sunshine Church north of Macon, and Stoneman and more than 400 others became the camp's final new prisoners. Not knowing Federal military objectives during the fall of 1864, the Confederates moved all prisoners from Camp Oglethorpe and many from Andersonville to South Carolina or southeastern Georgia. After the war, the Georgia State Fair was never again held on the site, and in 1904 one survivor, Governor Aaron T. Bliss of Michigan, regretted not seeing the stockade as it had looked forty years earlier but was glad to see industry established there as evidence that bitter feelings had been forgotten.