Union Army P.O.W. Cemetery

One published tally counts 21 Union prisoners dead at Camp Groce in 1863 and 147 in 1864. Most of the 1863 dead lie northeast of the camp, and others went to the McDade family plantation here. Surgeon Ariel Cummings of the 42nd Massachusetts, who died of overwork and disease, was buried in September 1863 with a Masonic service attended by Union and Confederate Masons. The cedar-limb crosses are gone. A second marker, the Camp Groce Cemetery stone of 2017, stands east of FM 359.

What the plaque says

Union Army P.O.W. Cemetery Several Confederate military facilities were positioned near Hempsted (2.5 mi. w), an important railroad junction, during the Civil War. Camp Groce (then about 6 mi. e) was a prisoner-of-war stockade established on the plantation of Leonard Waller Groce (1806-1873). Union Army prisoners who died at various camps were buried hear this site on the McDade Plantation, adjacent to the McDade family cemetery (about 25 yds. ne). The cemeteries were near a narrow gauge spur off the "Austin Branch" of the Houston & Texas Central Railroad, built from Houston in 1858. A yellow fever epidemic in 1864 resulted in many deaths at Camp Groce and other camps, chronicled by Aaron T. Sutton (1841-1927). a Union prisoner in Company B, 83rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Sutton noted in his journal the presence of more than 100 fresh graves here soon after his arrival at Camp Groce in 1864. Sutton later escaped from the stockade and made his way to Beaumont (115 mi. e) on foot. Crude crosses made of cedar limbs marked the prisoners' graves through the early 1900s, according to local residents. But the stream-fed woodland was cleared in the 1940s for pasture land, and all surface evidence of the cemetery was lost. (1986)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Star of the Republic Museum — 15 mi
  A star-shaped museum of the Republic of Texas years, 1836 to 1846, built at Washington-on-the-Brazos after a Brenham campaign and opened on March 1, 1970.
• Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site — 15 mi
  The townsite on the Brazos where delegates met in a cold, unfinished hall in March 1836 to declare Texas independent, with Independence Hall rebuilt and Anson Jones's Barrington farm worked as in 1850.
• Navasota — 19 mi
  A railroad and cotton town where the La Bahia Road crossed the Navasota River, scarred by an 1865 explosion and yellow fever, and the home ground of the songster Mance Lipscomb.
• Independence and Old Baylor Park — 20 mi
  A crossroads north of Brenham that was the richest town in Texas when it won Baylor University in 1845, refused the railroad, and lost the college to Waco and Belton in 1886.

More markers nearby

• Madison "Matt" "Kilpatrick" — 2.1 mi
• Hempstead High School — 3.1 mi
• Former Waller County Post Offices — 3.2 mi
• Hempstead, C.S.A. — 3.3 mi