The Corinth Contraband Camp began as a tent city in the fall of 1862 on the Phillips farm, northeast of the railroad crossing, organized by Union General Grenville Dodge and run by a chaplain, James M. Alexander. Enslaved people had been reaching Union lines, and their numbers grew after Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on 22 September 1862. By December Ulysses S. Grant reported about twenty thousand refugees in his department.
At Corinth the camp became a town, with a church, a commissary, a hospital, frame and log houses and a street grid with named streets. The American Missionary Association ran a school nearby, where students of every age came by day and night. Residents farmed four hundred acres cooperatively, three hundred in cotton and the rest in vegetables, and were paid for their work. A superintendent of freedmen estimated the camp's monthly profit at four to five thousand dollars in 1863. At its peak as many as six thousand people lived here.
Dodge enlisted men from the camp. The 1st Alabama Infantry of African Descent was organized at Corinth on 21 May 1863, became the 55th United States Colored Troops, and fought at Brices Cross Roads. At least eighteen hundred Black men were recruited at Corinth. When the Union army left in January 1864, most residents followed it to Memphis. Today a quarter-mile walkway holds six life-size bronze figures of men, women and children. The camp is opposite the corner of Bunch Street and North Parkway.
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