During the Civil War, several Confederate military facilities stood near Hempsted, an important railroad junction. Camp Groce, a prisoner-of-war stockade established on the plantation of Leonard Waller Groce, lay east of Hempsted. Union Army prisoners who died at various camps were buried near this site on the McDade Plantation beside the McDade family cemetery. The burial ground stood near a narrow gauge spur off the Austin Branch of the Houston & Texas Central Railroad, built from Houston in 1858. A yellow fever epidemic in 1864 caused many deaths at Camp Groce and other camps. Aaron T. Sutton of Company B, 83rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, recorded in his journal that more than 100 fresh graves were here soon after he arrived at Camp Groce in 1864. He later escaped from the stockade and walked to Beaumont. According to local residents, crude crosses made of cedar limbs marked the prisoners' graves through the early 1900s, but when the stream-fed woodland was cleared for pasture in the 1940s, all surface evidence of the cemetery disappeared.