Sand Blows Desperately: Land-Use History and Site Integrity at Camp Ford, a Confederate POW Camp in East Texas

Abstract

Archaeological investigations revealed well-preserved remains of Camp Ford (41SM181), an East Texas Civil War site where Confederate guards held up to 4,800 Union prisoners of war (POWs) in a stockaded compound on a sandy hillside. The prisoners brought tons of clayey sediment onto the site’s loamy sand soil for construction of houses and as backdirt from refuse pits. Abandoned at war’s end and probably salvaged for useable logs, Camp Ford became farmland, ultimately a pine-tree farm. Among identified subsurface features were stockade-wall trenches, refuse pits, dugouts, and clay-lined cabin floors. Trenches and pits in the sandy solum typically exhibited remarkably abrupt boundaries with the surrounding subsoil, in contrast to markedly less distinctive feature boundaries encountered at most sandy-landform sites in the region. Good preservation conditions resulted in large measure from postwar development of a clay-rich B horizon (Bt) and lamellae (thin clayey bands), which retarded eluviation in the underlying 2Eb horizon and thereby preserved feature boundaries.