Pvt. John Alexander Baker

Pvt John Alexander Baker

• BIRTH 4 Oct 1823 - Pickens County, South Carolina, USA
• DEATH 28 Apr 1862 (aged 38) - Hempstead, Waller County, Texas, USA
• BURIAL Camp Groce Confederate Soldiers Cemetery, Waller County, Texas, USA
• MEMORIAL ID 130221876 · View Source

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/130221876/john-alexander-baker
Died at Camp Carter new Hempstead, Texas

Inscription
Company G, 24th Texas Cavalry (Dismounted)

Birth: unknown Pickens County South Carolina, USA Death: Apr. 28, 1862 Hempstead Waller County Texas, USA

Died at Camp Carter near Hempstead, Texas

Family links:

Spouse:

 Margrett M. Baker (1828 - 1915)*

Inscription: Company G, 24th Texas Cavalry (Dismounted)

Burial: Camp Groce Confederate Soldiers Cemetery Waller County Texas, USA

Camp Groce: 30o 05’ 11.39” N 96o 02’ 33.26” W

Texas' Civil War camp not forgotten

By TERRY KLIEWER Houston Chronicle

HEMPSTEAD - They were forgotten men in a remote corner of the Civil War, but Houston historian Danial Lisarelli hopes to roll back 140 years of neglect to win them the honor they deserve. The men in question are more than 150 Union prisoners who died of disease or exposure, in many cases both, and were buried near here at the old Confederate prisoner-of-war camp known as Camp Groce. Nothing marks the soldiers' and sailors' presence. Nothing commemorates the wretched stockade in which they languished for country and cause. For well over a century, little has served to resurrect their memory.

But Lisarelli has decided we should remember, and a small but growing number of people agree. Among them are several descendants of Camp Groce prisoners, appalled that the prison site has yet to be suitably memorialized, and Waller County Commissioner Frank Jackson, who envisions the site assuming a new role as centerpiece for a "history trail" across the county. Patti Overfield of Leavenworth, Kan., the 77-year-old great-granddaughter of a Camp Groce prisoner who didn't survive the ordeal, says she can't understand why the site remains uncelebrated.

"These men fought and died the same as other men in other cemeteries," she reasons. "They were patriots. I feel badly that nothing has been done for them." Jackson hopes to rectify that in the spring by earmarking money in the county budget for a monument for the site. He regrets that indifference seems to have consigned Camp Groce to oblivion.

"People ought to be able to know what happened here during the Civil War and see where it took place," he contends. That is what Lisarelli wants, too. A 38-year-old computer sciences teacher in Galveston, he spends much of his spare time on Civil War research and re-enactment. Last month, he completed a self-published account of Camp Groce.

His work, The Last Prison, The Untold Story of Camp Groce CSA, provides a comprehensive roll call of the men - and at least one woman, a civilian prisoner's wife - who passed through the prison. Where he could, he tapped third- and fourth-generation descendants of the captives for family lore about their forebears' imprisonment. "It's all there," he says. "Everything I could possibly find. The names, the dates - the proof."

Proof may be a pivotal concept. Lisarelli suspects Camp Groce hasn't gotten its due because it has nothing obvious to declare what it is. There are no stockade ruins, no crumbling foundations or rusty cannons. For as long as anyone can remember, the prison grounds have been cattle pasture or hayfield. A state historical marker notes that a Civil War POW camp once stood in the vicinity, and that's about it.

Lack of documentation and an absence of marked graves permitted the site over time to assume a hazy, semimythical status and ultimately to be disregarded. "It eventually became one of those folklore things," says Lisarelli. "People would tell all kinds of stories about an old Confederate prison near Hempstead. No one knew much specific about it."

With little to go on but legend, he set out to learn the truth. From Hempstead restaurateur Will Detering, who owns Civil War-era Liendo Plantation outside town, he learned another man was on a similar quest. That explorer, retired Navy Cmdr. Francis Harding of Newport, Maine, was seeking the whereabouts of the notorious prison that once held John Read, his great-grandfather. Read, paymaster of the Union ship Granite City, became a prisoner when his vessel was among those captured at the Battle of Calcasieu Pass in southern Louisiana in May 1864.

Read survived Camp Groce, as did roughly 80 percent of its roll of 1,100 prisoners from 1863 to 1865. But he returned home with bitter memories. He testified before Congress about the dwindling food stores, the foul water, the dilapidated shelter and the relentless specter of death by disease, starvation or exposure.

Read kept a diary of his ordeal, and Harding furnished a copy to Lisarelli for research. Now 68, Harding says his great-granddad's eight-month purgatory at Camp Groce was a milestone in the clan's 350-year history in America, and his aim when he came to Texas in 1994 was to flesh out the family legend. "I went out to Liendo to look around. But all I saw was a field with a bunch of mean-looking Brahma cattle, so I didn't walk too far," he says with a chuckle.

That was just as well because the prison site lay a mile away and was well disguised as ordinary farmland. It wasn't until 1994 that Lisarelli and Houston amateur archaeologist Clarence Miller pinpointed the prison's exact location in a pasture near Business U.S. 290 and Texas 362. "I simply wanted to see about having a marker erected at the place," Harding says. "I didn't find much interest in the idea, so I came back home."

Miller, a 63-year-old retired engineer, isn't too surprised: "People are kind of funny about doing something with land where people are buried, especially if it isn't a battlefield." Indeed, enshrining a field of victory, or even defeat, is easier than commemorating a disgrace, which is what Camp Groce amounted to. While it wasn't nearly the equal of the Confederates' infamous Andersonville, Ga., prison, the Texas prison camp wasn't really so different either, Lisarelli's research suggests.

Built on what was then Liendo Plantation property near the Houston-to-Hempstead rail line, the camp opened in 1862 to quarter Confederate recruits. It was named for Liendo owner Leonard Waller Groce, and consisted of two barracks, a frame house, two other small buildings and two wells. One side of the camp sloped down to brushy, often-sluggish Clear Creek. Surrounded by thicket, the camp was a rude outpost two miles east of the tiny town of Hempstead in then-Austin County.

Abandoned by the Confederates in early 1863, Camp Groce was reclaimed June 13, 1863, when about 100 Union prisoners taken at battles at Galveston and Sabine Pass arrived. Those first arrivals hoped to be paroled quickly in prisoner exchanges, but that was not to be. On July 8 the new prison recorded its first fatality, Capt. Peter Le Provost from the Union ship Morning Light. The 22-year-old native of the Isle of Guernsey died from an illness akin to severe bronchitis, Lisarelli surmises from cryptic medical records. Le Provost was buried under a tree outside the camp.

By late July, dysentery had appeared and more graves were dug. By the end of August, the camp was turning into a ramshackle outdoor hospital as conditions deteriorated. POWs traded possessions for food and supplies from area residents. "I don't think anyone intended that the camp be that way," says Caroline Read Harding, Francis Harding's mother. "It wasn't calculated cruelty. It just happened."

At 89, she faintly remembers her grandfather, who died when she was 5. The Westwood, Mass., resident said her mother told her that her granddad had described the camp as "nothing but a primitive stockade in the middle of a swamp (where) the snakes would crawl up next to the men on the ground at night to keep warm."

In September 1863, more prisoners arrived after the second Battle of Sabine Pass. By then, Camp Groce was becoming a hell hole, Lisarelli says, with deaths escalating and an unusually cold winter looming. On Oct. 21, 1863, Seaman Thomas Caff of the Union ship Clifton died of exposure, according to records.

As the new year began, the 410-or-so prisoners saw their dream of freedom by parole almost realized, then dashed. They were marched to a proposed exchange point at Shreveport, La., in January rain and snow, then turned around and marched back after the Confederates were spooked by reports of a pending Union attack.

The spring brought 140 more prisoners, including Read, a Cambridge, Mass., native and Harvard University graduate who joined the Union Navy in 1862 but fell into Rebel hands after 18 months of service. He arrived just in time for the worst that Camp Groce would offer. The camp's new commander ordered gaps in the camp's 15-foot-tall stockade walls boarded shut, cutting off what little breeze the suffering men could enjoy. Behind the new barrier was a squalid scene: Vacant-eyed men in rags wandered the grounds. The buildings were falling down. One of the wells had caved in. No medicine was available.

Meager rations of bacon and cornmeal, ground mostly from corn cobs, were insufficient; a few men already had died of starvation. Then, in late summer, yellow fever began to spread inland from Galveston. In September the prisoners were evacuated on foot and by wagon first to Bellville, then Chappell Hill before trudging back to Camp Groce after the epidemic had passed.

The trek, a virtual death march, killed 120 of the 620 men, and they were buried along the route. The POWs' dire predicament led to escape attempts, a few of which succeeded. Most runaways were caught quickly, Lisarelli says. Their punishment usually was close confinement; corporal punishment was rare, records indicate.

Finally, late in 1864, the prisoner-parole effort produced results. A new agreement set the stage for everyone to be released by year's end. The pact came too late for Overfield's great-grandfather, Pvt. George Washington Croce of the 14th Kansas Cavalry, who died on Nov. 1 after seven months in custody.

"All we know today is what was told to my great-grandmother by two men who had been at Camp Groce and escaped," says Overfield. "They said he died while a prisoner down there." Lisarelli says Croce probably was buried outside Bellville. He's still not certain how many of the 200-plus men who died during Camp Groce's grim 18 months of operation were laid in graves near the camp and how many were interred where they fell during the abortive Shreveport prisoner-swap march or the yellow fever evacuation.

But all those who died, like those who survived, came from across the Union. At various times, the prison also held Unionists from Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. Ironically, among the Texan dead at Camp Groce were several Confederate guards killed by the same diseases that killed their captives.

Coincidentally, it was on Dec. 19, 1864 - 135 years ago today - that the last 101 prisoners from Camp Groce arrived in Galveston to board a Union ship to go home. The camp they vacated was soon picked clean of its lumber and furnishings. Grave markers disappeared, too. Almost overnight, Camp Groce vanished.

Archaeologist Miller has scoured the site for relics, turning up buttons, bullets and assorted metal bric-a-brac still intact after being in the acidic soil. He recovered no bones and figures few remain. An excavation has never been attempted, nor does one seem imminent. Miller says the owners and tenants of the privately owned land have no plans to change its farm use.

Several years back, a possible purchase of the site by Waller County was quietly in the works, but it stalled and no new proposal has been forthcoming. Jackson hopes the state might consider the purchase. Lisarelli is hopeful but realistic:

"Speaking for myself, all I need now is a piece of ground to put up a piece of granite to mark these men's memories. That's all I ask."