Before the Civil War, Lynchburg was known as “Tobacco Town,” with seventy thriving tobacco businesses, numerous warehouses, and the terminus of three railroads. Early in the Civil War, many warehouses were converted to hospitals, and the railroad became the conduit for Confederate casualties pouring into the city. At a peak time after the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864, Lynchburg, with six thousand inhabitants, was overwhelmed with over ten thousand wounded and diseased soldiers. During the four-year Civil War, as the South’s largest outpost hospital center, Lynchburg admitted in excess of twenty thousand patients with nearly three thousand deaths. More than two thousand two hundred of those soldiers are buried in the Confederate Section of the Old City Cemetery. Tobacco warehouses, other buildings, and private homes used as temporary hospitals brought the total number of hospitals to over thirty.