Bloomfield’s strategic position on the high ground of Crowley’s Ridge made it an important Civil War crossroads contested by Union and Confederate forces, and the community changed hands more than twenty times as both armies used local businesses and homes as hospitals for sick and wounded soldiers. The large home of Major Henry Bedford, a prominent Bloomfield attorney with Confederate sympathies, was seized by Union troops in early 1862 and converted into the Bedford Hospital, where Union surgeon Lt. Thomas E. Johnson was credited with providing excellent care; he later married Bedford’s stepdaughter, Laura Robinson, a Confederate sympathizer, in October 1863 and after the war lived and practiced medicine in Bloomfield for many years. The town’s first hospital was probably the new school academy on Missouri Street, prepared before General Jeff Thompson’s 1861 attack on Fredericktown to receive military casualties. Another building long identified as a Civil War hospital was the home of merchant Norphlat “North” Jones at Shawnee and Spring; after Jones, a strong Union supporter, left for Cape Girardeau and died, his widow Sarah Christy Jones returned to Bloomfield and made the house available as a hospital, and several Union grave sites are said to exist on the property. Near the end of the war, Union physician Dr. Cyrus T. Kimmel occupied a large house at Center and Spring that had earlier served as Union headquarters, had it cleaned and converted to a hospital, vaccinated forty Union soldiers on the first day there, cared for two wounded cavalrymen, and also treated civilian families while boarding nearby at the home of Sarah Christy Jones.