The Depot Field Hospital

Across the cove, on the site of the modern hospital, stood the largest Union hospital at City Point. The Depot Field Hospital covered 200 acres and could care for as many as 10,000 patients. When Abraham Lincoln visited on April 8, 1865, he shook hands with more than 6,000 patients, both Union and Confederate. Throughout the Siege of Petersburg, the hospital provided trained staff, running water, a steam laundry, reading rooms, and other amenities. Of the more than 70,000 men treated there during the war, fewer than three percent died while in its care. Its neat tents and wards, replacing makeshift shelters and bloodstained farmhouses, reflected conditions far removed from the crude and often gruesome hospitals of the war’s earlier battlefields.

Hopewell, Virginia · United States