Salisbury Prison was established by the Confederate government in October 1861 on the site of an old cotton factory, with a stockade built for about 2,500 people and intended for Confederate soldiers guilty of military offenses and prisoners of state, but Union prisoners from Richmond, Virginia, began arriving in December. During the early years of the war, conditions were adequate, but after 5 October 1864, when 5,000 prisoners of war were transferred there, the population rose to more than 10,000 by the end of the month. With the prison holding four times its intended number, men crowded into every available space, some dug burrows for shelter, rations and safe drinking water became scarce, an unusually cold and wet winter worsened conditions, and disease and starvation spread as all buildings inside the stockade were turned into hospitals. Each morning the dead were collected, placed in the dead house, and later buried in trench graves in a cornfield west of the prison; although no complete burial lists survive and the graves were not marked with headboards, records indicate that about 3,700 men died there between October 1864 and February 1865. Surviving prisoners were released at the end of February in a prisoner exchange, and Union forces burned the prison in April. After the war, the Office of the Quartermaster sought the graves of Union soldiers, and inspection reports from 1866 to 1869 recorded 13 to 18 trenches at Salisbury. Because no comprehensive list of the dead existed, the government chose to erect a monument to the soldiers who died at the prison and to place Unknown markers at the trench ends; although the Army later reported an estimated 11,700 burials based on limited trench excavations and that number was inscribed on the memorial, earlier documentation and death figures from 1864 to 1865 suggest a much lower total. Lorenzo Deming, a landsman in the U.S. Navy who served on U.S. Picket Boat No. 1 in the 27 October 1864 attack on the Confederate ironclad Albemarle, entered Salisbury Prison after the picket boat was destroyed and most of its crew of 15 were captured or drowned; he died there in February 1865 and is presumed to be buried in the trench graves. The Medal of Honor, created during the Civil War as the highest award for military valor in the U.S. Armed Services, was authorized for sailors and marines in December 1861 and for Army noncommissioned officers and privates on 12 July 1862; 1,522 were awarded for the Civil War, and Deming's shipmates received theirs after release from prison in March 1865 while his was sent to his widow.