In early September 1864, after General William Tecumseh Sherman's Union army took Atlanta and threatened the Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia, the Confederate government transferred many prisoners more than 300 miles northeast to Florence, South Carolina, where enslaved persons hastily built a new prison. The first Union prisoners arrived in mid-September. The Florence Stockade, just south of here, covered about 23 acres, was divided by a stream, enclosed by a tall log fence, overlooked from a high outer parapet, and protected by a deep moat against tunneling. Conditions in the open-air prison were miserable: prisoners had very little food and only makeshift shelter, including hovels dug into the ground, and many died from disease, starvation, exposure, or wounds suffered before capture. In late February 1865, as Union forces approached, the stockade was abandoned and the prisoners were moved to camps in North Carolina. During nearly six months, 12,000 Union prisoners were held there and 2,802 died. The dead were buried in 16 trenches about a quarter mile north of here without coffins and marked only by wooden stakes, while another nearby burial ground was also used. In 1865 Florence National Cemetery was established around the trench burials, and bodies from the other burial ground and from Darlington, Chesterfield, and Marion counties were reinterred in two new sections. Although the names of Union dead buried in the trenches were recorded, the graves could not be matched to individual names. The wooden stakes were later replaced with 6 x 6 inch marble blocks, and the trenches are now marked by upright stones inscribed with the number buried in each row. Archaeological investigations in 2005 and 2006 on a 10-acre parcel identified a camp used by Confederate guards north of the stockade, including dugout shelters, tent stands, privies, latrine trenches, trash pits, and regularly arranged company streets. Excavations recovered 5,828 historic artifacts, including ammunition, bayonets, canteens, bottles, dishes, pipes, and cooking implements.