Cabell, professor of anatomy and surgery at the University of Virginia, managed the facility and oversaw, among others, McKennie the sword maker and Dr. It was twenty-four to thirty-six hours by train from Manassas Junction to Charlottesville, for instance, and at least one physician suggested that food and care were not provided during the trip.Ĭharlottesville General Hospital employed approximately three hundred Charlottesville residents and grew to a capacity of 500 beds staffed by between fifteen and fifty doctors. Still, getting to the hospital could be a long, dangerous, and painful journey for many soldiers. Opened in July 1861 just in time to treat wounded soldiers from the First Battle of Manassas, it served 22,700 patients during the war. The Confederate government viewed Charlottesville as a favorable location for the hospital because of its proximity to the Confederate capital and two major railroads, the Virginia Central and the Orange and Alexandria. Petition Concerning Confederate Medical CareĬharlottesville was also home to Charlottesville General Hospital, a makeshift military medical center housed in various public and private buildings across town, including hotels, churches, and facilities belonging to the University of Virginia. (Henry Marchant reopened the facility in 1867 as the Charlottesville Woolen Mills, and it became Albemarle County’s largest industry.) Marchant from 1852 until 1864, when his son, Henry Clay Marchant, bought it, the factory was burned by occupying Union forces in 1865. The Charlottesville Manufacturing Company operated cotton and woolen mills that produced Confederate uniforms. Still, it was “uninteresting,” according to a visiting doctor, “nothing more than a small village built mostly of frame houses.” After the Virginia Convention in Richmond voted to secede on April 17, 1861, most white Charlottesville residents enthusiastically supported the Confederacy, and the town’s light industry mobilized for the war effort. On the eve of the Civil War, Charlottesville’s population was only about 3,000, but it had surpassed Scottsville as the largest town in Albemarle County and home of several factories, banks, and hotels, as well as six newspapers. In 1819 Thomas Jefferson established the University of Virginia about a mile west of town. Early the next year, town leaders surrendered Charlottesville to Custer, preventing the community’s destruction.Ĭharlottesville was founded in 1762 and named in honor of Queen Charlotte, consort of Great Britain’s King George III. Custer was stopped just north of the city in the spring of 1864. Although the war’s fighting stayed mostly to the east and west, a raid led by Union general George A. In 1863, black members of the biracial First Baptist Church established the Charlottesville African Church. African Americans, both enslaved and free, who composed a majority of the town and county’s population, were the subject of heightened white fears of violence, their movements controlled by a curfew. The unit served with the Army of Northern Virginia all the way through to the Appomattox Campaign (1865), including at Pickett’s Charge (1863), where it lost 60 percent of its men. In the summer of 1861, the 19th Virginia Infantry Regiment was organized, recruiting most of its members from Charlottesville and Albemarle County. Cabell, a professor of medicine at the nearby University of Virginia. It was also home to a 500-bed military hospital that employed hundreds of the town’s residents, cared for more than 22,000 patients, and was superintended by Dr. Charlottesville provided the Confederate war effort with swords, uniforms, and artificial limbs during the American Civil War (1861–1865).
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