Camp Nelson National Monument Kentucky Where Colored Troops Trained and Their Families Were Expelled

Last month I posted pictures of a whole lot of Civil War and Reconstruction sites from a Confederate cemetery in Columbus, Ohio, to General Grant’s home in St. Louis, Missouri. Every day there were new pictures from Lincoln’s Kentucky birthplace, to New Salem, Illinois where Lincoln came of age. My wife was in every post, and friends asked me how I got her to agree to visit all of these sites. I didn’t. For my birthday, without me asking for it, Michele told me she was giving me a trip to the Midwest to see Lincoln’s home in Springfield, Illinois and we could stop to see sites along the way. Since my health is declining, she did all the driving from New York to New Jersey and then on to Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Missouri, and Illinois, and then back again. She did over 2,300 miles of driving in six days. On our third day of exploring, we visited Camp Nelson National Monument about a half-hour south of Lexington, Kentucky. Its address is 6614 Old Danville Road Loop 2, Nicholasville, KY, United States, Kentucky. The site is free and there is adequate parking.

Camp Nelson was set up to train newly recruited white Union soldiers, to protect the Hickman Bridge over the Kentucky River, and to serve as a supply depot for Union forces heading into Tennessee. Over time, it also housed a large military hospital, a prison, a recruiting and a training ground for the Black United States Colored Troops, and a safe place for Black refugees escaping their enslavers.

One of the great resources at Camp Nelson is the staff. They not only educate visitors to the camp, they also do educational outreach to the local community. Above I am with National Park Service (NPS) historian Steve Phan (left) and supervisory Ranger Brendan Kane. They were incredibly helpful in deepening my own understanding of the site. I also met with several volunteers and other staff as well as with Superintendent Ernie Price, all of whom took time to answer my questions and to direct me to other sites at the park. We need the staff at the National Park Service to keep our history alive during our lifetimes and those of our children and grandchildren. My wife and I try to call every month to our Congresspeople to keep providing adequate funding for the NPS.

By the way, after my wife sent me the picture above, I lost nine pounds in two weeks. A good incentive to lose weight is to see yourself with other people who look the way I used to look thirty years ago!

The building we are in front of is the Visitors’ Center and Museum. I went in thinking the only thing to see was the small exhibits on the front room wall, but I quickly realized my mistake. There were Rangers at the front desk willing to show us where to go inside the main park, at the 150 year old church a short ways away, and at the National Cemetery adjoining the park. Then we were led into to see a seventeen minute film on the site. After that we entered the museum. Considering the fact that this site has only been a National Park for the last decade, I was surprised at the great presentation in the museum. I was told by Steve Phan that before it became a National Monument, Camp Nelson was being developed as an historic site by local and state government and that the NPS incorporated prior exhibits into the new museum.

A simple topographical map introduces the visitors to the geography of Camp Nelson. With two-thirds of the camp being bounded by the Kentucky River, the geography made it easy to defend against an attack.

For people over fifty years of age, even these simple 3-D maps hold a certain excitement for us.

When I was growing up, my father, an army veteran, said that an army always marches on its stomach. I am sure you heard that too. Logistics are a key to advancing an army through enemy territory. Yet at too few battlefields are the logistic problems illustrated. At Camp Nelson there is a whole section of the museum devoted to supply.

We meet Captain Theron Hall who handled the supplies for the camp, including clothing and feeding hundreds of Black refugees and equipping the new Union recruits from East Tennessee, and Black recruits from Kentucky and Tennessee. Hall would later play a key role in reversing the expulsion order issued by the camp’s commander driving out the Black wives and children of the United States Colored Troops.

You even get to peer into a supply room in one of the warehouses at the camp.

You can also see the means of transportation for the supplies going out to the armies.

Camp Nelson did not just keep supplies manufactured elsewhere. It also made things of use to the camp and the army. For example, the waterworks brought water from far down the cliffs from the Kentucky River up to the camp.

The site became an industrial center with basic manufacturing going on.

There are displays of the uses of the products.

The camp also had its own Machine Shop where carpentry work was done. The soldiers did not order doors, for example, they made them.

The museum also shows who lived there. A section devoted to the families of United States Colored Soldiers shows the Booker family.

Women and children were important components of the refugee community. Their bravery helped end slavery.

I was amazed at the photos of the Booker family and other families that found refuge at Camp Nelson.

The museum does a good job of showing how the people who lived here were not just surviving, they were being educated, organizing a church, and making music for each other.

The museum also shows how after the camp was disbanded in 1866, some refugees set up their own settlements nearby.

The refugees were, of course, part of a United States Colored Troop soldier’s family, but they also carried on their own work, prayer, and play.

The museum shows a cabin that the refugees lived in during the mid-1860s.

It was a hard life and an uncertain future, but there was a FUTURE.

The African American women did not just care for their children and minister to their husbands, they also did work for the army such as mending clothes and cooking food for the thousands of men at the camp.

This simple cabin has handiwork that I could never reproduce.

Families lived together in these cabins. Let us recall that as tough as life was here in Camp Nelson, a mother’s children could not be taken from her and sold off.

Next there is a section on the recruitment of United States Colored Troops (USCT). Again we are introduced to the USCT by being introduced to some ordinary Black men.

The photos of those who served are evocative.

There is also a section on Camp Nelson as a compound of hospitals.

Camp Nelson became one of the biggest hospitals in Kentucky.

Several spaces here are set up as hospital rooms and operating rooms.

The cross over the bed would have been prayed to several times a day.

The tools of the medical trade.

A wheelchair reminds us that some men recovered their health without recovering their limbs.

One of the most poignant subjects is the expulsion of approximately 400 refugee women and children by the Union commander of Camp Nelson. These were the wives and children of USCT.

On October 29, 1864 the commander of Camp Nelson notified his subordinates that “preparatory to the Regiments moving you will turn out of Camp all Negro women and children.”  On November 22, 1864 the expulsions began at the order of Brigadier General Speed S. Fry.

The order to turn out the refugees was not unopposed by white soldiers. Captain Theron Hall, who knew some of the former slaves personally, wrote at the time that “remembering that these people had followed their husbands and fathers to Camp” and that the “fathers” had enlisted and “were then in the Army fighting for that freedom of which it was by this act [of expulsion] to deprive their families,” he decided that he could not stand by.

Captain Hall feared that, cast out from the protection of the fort, the women and children would be re-enslaved. He wrote that he “firmly” believed that “the wife and children of the colored soldier were entitled to protection” by the government for the freedom for which the black soldier “was imperiling his life.” Hall said that given the threat to the lives and freedom of the expelled blacks, “I felt it my duty to interfere.”

The army captain called the expulsion order an “outrage.” He wrote that the “weather at the time was intensely cold, summary expulsion…would occasion untold suffering.” When the captain arrived at camp, most of the freed slaves had already been forced out. Captain Hall wrote to colleagues and superiors to try to reverse the order. He felt that urgent action was needed because he said that the scattered freed people were “literally starving to death.”

Hall sought out the expelled blacks and found them “sitting by the roadside and wandering about the fields.” He reported that “some have died and all are in a starving condition.” Another Union officer at Lexington Kentucky confirmed Hall’s assessment when he telegraphed that “Colored women and Children…are coming here where there is no shelter for them. They are suffering…”

By the time the order was reversed, over a quarter of those expelled had died from exposure to the freezing cold weather or from hunger.

Imagine being a member of the USCT and finding out that your family had been cast out to starve, freeze, or be taken back into slavery.

While the crisis was still unresolved, a reporter for the New York Herald filed a story that said that Camp Nelson “has recently been the scene of a system of deliberate cruelty…frail women and delicate children have been driven from their homes by United States soldiers, and are now…literally starving…”

The reporter described the cruelty of the expulsions; “Armed soldiers attack humble huts inhabited by poor negroes…order the inmates on pain of instant death, and complete their valorous achievements by demolishing dwellings. The men who did this were United States soldiers.” The article tallied the toll “To-day these children of misery are exposed to the pitiless storm. Four are already in their graves; one was frozen to death.”

The personal statement of a black soldier, Joseph Miller, shows the way one family experienced this dark moment. Miller, his wife, and their four children lived at the Camp. Miller’s wife and children were given “express permission” by an officer to live in the camp while Joseph was in the army. At 8 PM on November 22, Miller’s wife was told that she and her children had to leave the camp before morning.

Miller said that:

The morning was bitter cold….I was certain that it would kill my sick child to take him out in the cold. I told the man in charge of the guard that it would be the death of my boy. …He told me that it did not make any difference. He had orders… He told my wife and family that if they did not get up into the wagon…he would shoot the last one of them.

On being threatened my wife and children went into the wagon. …[H]aving had to leave much of our clothing when we left our master, my wife with her little ones was poorly clothed.

Joseph Miller went in search of his family that night. He found them six miles away in a meeting house. He said that:

I found my wife and children shivering with cold and famished with hunger. They had not received a morsel of food during the whole day. My boy was dead.

Miller walked six miles back to Camp Nelson so he would not be arrested as a deserter, leaving his family shivering. The next morning he walked back to them; “I dug a grave myself and buried my own child. I left my family in the Meeting house-where they still remain,” he testified on November 26.

Miller was not able to get back to his family. For six months he had no news from them. Then he learned that a few weeks after he left them his son Joseph Jr. and his wife had died. A week later his daughter died. His remaining son Calvin died on January 2, 1865.

General Fry’s order scattering the refugees had cost a Union soldier his entire family at the moment that they had believed that they were finally free.

President Lincoln sent General Lorenzo Thomas to Camp Nelson after the matter had been brought to his attention by African American leaders, the Quartermaster of Camp Nelson, and Rev. John Fee, one of the most progressive clergymen in Kentucky. Thomas had the refugee camp reestablished under a new system that allowed Fee and Hall to set up state of the art refugee housing and services.

The next section concerns archeology at Camp Nelson both at the base’s prison and at Fort Putnam, one of the forts protecting the camp.

All sorts of 19th Century materials are on display, most recaptured just a few hundred yards from the museum.

Soldiers’ glasses, a tea cup, bottles, and more, help give you a chance to capture some of the lives of these men, women, and children.

Across from the museum is the reconstructed United States Colored Troops’ barracks.

To get these men, they did not just enlist, they had to escape slavery.

Inside are the simple quarters of the Black troops.

When I would visit 19th Century structures, my kids were always fascinated with the cast iron stoves.

And, again, we learn about the life inside of the barracks from several soldiers like this Tennessee cavalryman. David Sells was a white corporal who fled East Tennessee for refuge in Kentucky.

Here is a reproduction of his uniform.

Nearby is the equipment of a cavalryman.

William Wright was a private in the 114th United States Colored Infantry. He was enslaved until he joined the Union Army in June 1864. While he was trained at Camp Nelson, his unit was transferred to join in the Petersburg Campaign in Virginia. As with many of the USCT, after Lee’s surrender he was sent to Texas to defend against the rump French dictatorship in Mexico.

Here is a reproduction of a United States Colored Infantry uniform,

The museum and the barracks are fully accessible. If you want to explore the trails, they may be too much for people with limited mobility. There are several miles of trails through Camp Nelson and its forts which are not paved. If you look at the photo below you can see the wooden wall and earthworks near the trees. On the right is a mowed path to Fort Putnam, but it is not paved. I am almost seventy years of age and was not challenged on it, but someone with a walker or a wheelchair may not be able to cope with it.

If you can handle the mobility issue, you should walk to Fort Putnam. My wife and I found we could see a lot of the geography discussed in the museum.

We enjoyed looking at the wildflowers out on the trail and we could see the National Cemetery across the road.

The earthworks have been partially restored in Fort Putnam and there are adequate interpretive signs.

At several sites around the park there are flags marking where the sites are. The red flag is in the middle of Fort Putnam. You can see two pieces of artillery to the right of the flag.

One cannon is a 12lb. Napoleon, the most common artillery piece used throughout the Civil War. This cannon could be used in a fort or transported using a limber and caisson for hundreds of miles.

There is also a thirty pound Parrot Gun. This type of artillery was invented right before the Civil War and it was in use to defend fortifications, to assault forts, and for naval bombardments.

From outside the front of the fort, you can see the Parrot Gun covered by the earthworks.

Both cannons can be seen here. There were 18 Napoleons and three Parrot guns during the war, the cannons now are representational. The camp was moderately armed during the Civil War.

The Napoleon in place from in front of the fort.

There is a memorial at Graveyard Number 1 where some refugees were buried. These included both white and Black refugees, primarily women and children. We do not know how many people are interred here but the estimates range from one hundred to several hundred. There are graves in the national cemetery as well as two additional graveyards for smallpox victims located to the west of U.S. 27.

An 1866 report described Graveyard Number 1: “The first yard visited contained upwards of an acre of land and was nearly filled containing soldiers, both white and black, negro women and children, and refugees. The soldiers are buried at either end, the negro women and children and refugees between them. This yard is without the benefit of fortifications and is on the land of Mr. Oliver Perry.”

The memorial is easily seen from the barracks but it can be hard to get to for people with mobility issues.

The inscription on the monument says (according to the Historical Marker Data Base):

Camp Nelson Graveyard No. 1

To Those Buried Here
Here lie the bodies of numerous unknown Tennessee white refugees and Kentucky African-American refugees who perished from disease while at Camp Nelson. These civilians sought freedom and protection within this U.S. Army Post.

(West Face)
African-American Refugees
Thousands of African-American women and children, most of who were families of U.S. Colored Troops, entered Camp Nelson in 1864-65 seeking freedom from slavery.

(North Face)
“The Soldiers Are Buried At Either End…”
The bodies of 217 Union soldiers both black and white, were originally buried in this cemetery surrounding the civilian graves. They were moved to the Camp Nelson National Cemetery following its creation in 1866.

(East Face)
Tennessee Refugees
Many wives and children of East Tennessee Union enlistees accompanied them into Camp Nelson in 1863 to escape Confederate occupation.

Brendan Kane who supervised Rangers in this region was very helpful. Neither my wife nor I had ever been to the National Monument and he and other staff (including Steve Phan) were very helpful in planning our walks. If you are uncertain about anything, go to the Visitors’ Center for assistance.

One our way out we visited the White House, named that because it is a house that is painted white! The house belonged to Oliver Perry, the owner of the land where Camp Nelson was built. This is the only building that dates back to the Civil War at the park. The house was used by Captain Theron E. Hall, Assistant Quartermaster, for his duties of supplying the men and refugees. He also used it in his role as Superintendent of the Home for Colored Refugees. The Perry family lived there until 1948. Jessamine County purchased the structure in 1997 for its planned Camp Nelson historic site. In 2025 the National Park Service did a Historic Structure Report which found graffiti left by Captain Theron E. Hall! He signed his name on the parlor wall.

The Historic Structure Report says that, while the National Monument appears big, 525 acres make it up, whereas Camp Nelson during the Civil War had 4,000 acres. Fort Putnam gives an impression of a fort, but there were seven others. Forts Hatch, Nelson, Jackson, Putnam, Pope, Taylor, McKee, and Jones were connected by defenses which no longer exist.

Capt. Theron E. Hall noted the defensive works around Camp Nelson:

It is naturally fortified on three sides by the
river and creek, the cliffs of which average four
hundred feet high and perpendicular. Across the
narrow neck from the river [the only exposed
part of camp] are fortifications of a most
formidable character connected by rifle pits and
protected by abatis. Every approach to the camp
is commanded by mounted guns and so far as its
natural defenses are concerned it is one of the
most impregnable points in the country. [From Historic Structure Report]

The house was a large structure consisting of fourteen rooms, indicating the class of its owners.

In the Historic Structure Report is a photo of a white officer and a Black man sharing a drink at the house which the authors say was a radical act at the time.

The self-guided tour I went on took about three hours. If you just want to see the movie, visit the museum, and the barracks, it should take take 90 minutes. To hike all the historic trails it will take about six hours.

Note: All color photos of buildings in this post were taken by Patrick Young except as noted.