Point of Rocks Hospital

Shortly after the Army of the James landed in Bermuda Hundred, a field hospital was established at Point of Rocks, first using tents in the orchard around the Strachan House. The tents were 50 feet long and held enough cots and bunks for 40 or more patients, though when crowded some patients lay on straw bags with a blanket on the bare ground. As the Bermuda Hundred Campaign gave way to the Siege of Petersburg, the hospital grew into a large complex of wood buildings organized into divisions by disease. Dr. Moses Greeley Parker described one division as 17 log wards, each 80 feet long, 20 feet wide, and 8 feet high, grouped like a horseshoe on the bluff, while other divisions had 8 wards each measuring 250 feet long, 30 feet wide, and 15 feet high, with room for 180 patients in each ward. More than 3,000 patients may have been there at any given time. A Federal cemetery was also established there, holding more than 2,500 soldiers by the end of the war, including more than 850 United States Colored Troops and a handful of Confederate soldiers, before the dead were moved after the war to City Point National Cemetery. The wall around City Point cemetery was built from stone quarried from the bluff that gave Point of Rocks its name. In March 1865, according to the regimental history of the 2nd Pennsylvania Heavy Artillery, an unusual patient arrived when a sergeant of the 10th New York Heavy Artillery, taken sick on the picket line and brought to the hospital on March 6, gave birth to a boy, apparently one of the rare Civil War cases of a woman impersonating a man.

Virginia · United States