Camp Felder

Camp Felder was a Confederate cavalry camp on New Year Creek land belonging to Gabriel Felder, who gave it his name, and it was in use as early as November 1863. The ground had previously been a Methodist camp meeting site. For about one month in the autumn of 1864 it was something else: a prison for Union soldiers. They had been moved out of Camp Groce near Hempstead to a camp near Bellville and then on to Camp Felder, in September 1864, specifically to get them away from a fever epidemic. Roughly five hundred arrived on 3 October. Clayton C. Gillespie is recorded as the commander. The move did not work. The camp sat on low ground in a valley between two hills next to Peach Creek, with the cavalry guard and its horses in sheds on the higher ground above, and the autumn was unusually wet. Conditions were markedly worse than at Camp Groce and yellow fever followed the prisoners anyway. The Handbook of Texas records a high mortality rate without giving a number. The state marker put up at the site in 2017 says the exact toll is unknown and estimates it at between forty three and seventy eight dead, along with at least two of the Confederate guards. At the end of October the survivors were returned to Camp Groce. They stayed there until December 1864, when 444 of them were put on a train to Galveston and paroled to the Union fleet. The camp ground itself lies about three quarters of a mile southwest, near Camp Felder Cemetery.