Camp Ashby was a World War II prisoner of war camp for German soldiers that occupied more than 200 acres just north of here. Its headquarters was the main building of the former Tidewater Memorial Hospital, a tuberculosis sanitarium that had opened on this site in 1937. Among the more than 6,000 men housed in the camp between Mar. 1944 and Apr. 1946 were troops from Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps and many soldiers captured on or shortly after D-Day. Because of acute labor shortages in the region, prisoners were deployed as agricultural and industrial workers. They earned wages, and the camp provided them with food, medical care, academic classes, church services, a library, and a theater.
