Exactly where was the Salisbury Confederate Prison located during the Civil War?
If a definitive answer to that question isn’t available yet, it’s closer today than it was before the fourth annual Salisbury Confederate Prison Symposium took place during the past weekend, says Sue Curtis, symposium committee chairman and long time former president of the Robert F. Hoke Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which sponsored it.
The new information continues its reputation for shedding new light on old subjects that’s become routine since the symposiums began in 1998, she says.
For the first time two researchers have independently reached the same conclusion.
Retired Salisbury physician Dr. Bob Tannehill and Annette Gee Ford, great niece of Dr. John Henry Gee, the last commandant of the prison, presented results of work they’re doing with maps of the prison.
Gee used a map drawn in 1866 which she included in her recent book, “The Captive,” about her great-uncle who was tried but acquitted on charges of war crimes after the Civil War. She got the map from the National Archives in Washington.
She and Tannehill used outside help to compare the old maps against the city streets and their conclusions were similar, Curtis said. Both deal with the question of a possible inner fence which must have been removed to expand the prison, and both agreed that today’s Horah Street must have been Cooper Street back then.
Both also agreed that the map done by Union soldiers for the trial of Dr. Gee in 1866 was the most correct they’ve seen.
Before Ford used that map in her book, most historians looked to the line drawing in Louis Brown’s book as the most accurate.
“The location of the prison,” Curtis says, “is a story getting ready to happen, because neither intends to stop their research. New avenues are opening up for Annette Ford who is going back to Washington, and Dr. Tannehill is talking to archaeologists at Wake Forest.”
But the exact location of the prison wasn’t the only part of the symposium that brought considerable excitement to more than 100 people from all over the country attending and taking part in the symposium.
Re-enactors from Company K of the 4th North Carolina troops replaced their usual gray uniforms with blue to shoot their muskets and talk to visitors on the Hall House lawn about life during and after the war.
They were particularly interested in life after the war because Gen. George Stoneman didn’t invade Salisbury until April 12, 1865.
That was three days after Gen. Robert E. Lee had surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to the Union on April 9. But mail and newspapers were slow.
Stoneman didn’t know the war was over when he occupied Salisbury and set up headquarters at the Hall House. Nor did he know that Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his whole cabinet were in a train car in Greensboro.
He left an occupation force here when he moved on the next day, and Confederates in North Carolina finally surrendered on April 26 at a farmhouse outside of Durham.
“But 90 percent of the world,” Curtis says, “considers the war ended when Lee surrendered.”
Also a highlight of the symposium was the visit of Paul Phipps of Burlington and his sister, Effie Whittle of Greensboro.
Their father was a guard at the Salisbury Prison, and they brought pictures of him and a brass horn which he took with him when he walked home from the prison at the end of the war.
They showed their pictures just before lunch, and when the morning’s events ended, people attending talked to them and posed for pictures with them —and with a brick from the prison.
The brick was given to the Salisbury Confederate Prison Association by Narvie Bonds, who found them in the 1960s when a massive downtown fire destroyed buildings in the first block of South Main Street. The prison bricks had been used for fill under those buildings.
“Phipps is legally blind,” Curtis said, “but he could feel the brick and mortar and talked about how different it is from bricks today.”
And that still wasn’t all that intrigued the crowd at the symposium.
On display with the brick was Don Weinhold’s hand-carved replica of the cotton factory which became the prison. And everyone left talking about Dr. Charles Cooke’s vivid talk — and pictures — of smallpox at the time. Prisoners tried to vaccinate themselves by rubbing the blisters from a person with smallpox onto their own bodies.All of it, Curtis says, left people excited with what they’d learning — wondering about what’s coming next year.
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