Camp Crossville

Prisoners at the camp were treated benevolently, in line with the Geneva Convention. They were allowed walks outside the compound, were sometimes paid small wages for farm labor, and could publish a camp newspaper. Nationally, only 1,583 of 356,560 prisoners escaped, and just twenty-two were never recaptured; one fluent English speaker who left Crossville stayed at large for several months before returning. New York's mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, paid a secret visit to confer with the Italian generals held there.

What the plaque says

Camp Crossville Opened in November 1942, one of the first prisoner of war camps during World War II, Camp Crossville housed over 1,500 German and Italian prisoners of war. Designated for officers, the camp held General Pietro Gazzeri, one of the Italian army's highest ranking officers. Also housed here were German officers of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's famed Afrika Korps. Camp Crossville was located on the Cumberland Plateau, nine miles west of Crossville on the site of the Civilian Conservation Corps camp. It closed in December 1945.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cumberland Homesteads and the Homesteads Tower — 7.6 mi
  The largest of the New Deal's subsistence homestead communities, a plateau district of Crab Orchard sandstone houses around an octagonal stone tower that now holds a museum.
• Muddy Pond Mennonite Community — 20 mi
  A Mennonite farming community in Overton County near Monterey, known for sorghum syrup pressed and boiled each fall and for the farm stores along its roads.
• Fall Creek Falls State Park — 22 mi
  A New Deal park on the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau, where Cane Creek has cut a gorge and a 256-foot waterfall drops into it.
• Cookeville Depot Museum — 28 mi
  The 1909 Tennessee Central Railroad depot in Cookeville's west side, now a museum with a model of the town in 1955 and a steam engine in the yard.

More markers nearby

• John Wood Dodge — 2.0 mi
• Cumberland Mountain State Park Bridge — 6.8 mi
• Earl Webb: Baseball Record Holder — 11 mi
• Kemmer Stand/Tavern — 11 mi