Wade Sokolosky has done a lot of research on the Civil War. He’s from Beaufort in Carteret County, so he’s familiar with nearby Fort Macon. In fact, his great-great uncle was an artilleryman who was captured at Fort Macon and later lost his life in the Battle of Goldsboro.
And when Sokolosky was in the U.S. Army, stationed at Fort Campbell, KY, he said he and a soldier friend visited the old battlefields that dot middle Tennessee, which further piqued his interest. So much so, that his master’s thesis was on Gen. Sherman’s Logistics, especially the Carolina Campaign and the March to the Sea.
All that research and searching through historical documents led him to be curious about hospitals that had been set up to treat and house soldiers. But he couldn’t find a single book about North Carolina Confederate hospitals.
In the last few years, Sokolosky, a retired Army colonel, has been working to change that. His first book, “North Carolina’s Confederate Hospitals 1861-1863” has been out since mid-July. But it will be Volume 2 that will have information about Vance County’s own Confederate Hospital, which was set up at Kittrell Springs.
Sokolosky spoke with Bill Harris and Mark Pace on Thursday’s tri-weekly history segment of TownTalk. He said that during the time he’s spent researching, he’s run across a lot of interesting tidbits of information about the hospitals, so he decided to organize the information he’d uncovered into a study of the Confederate hospitals and why and how they came to be.
The Kittrell Springs Hotel became the site for the Vance County hospital, known as General Hospital Number One.
“When it comes to hospitals, North Carolina didn’t have as many as Virginia,” Sokolosky said, but the state was in the top three or four. He said he hopes his books will help “fill a gap in our study of our state’s role in the war.”
He visited the National Archives in Washington, DC during his research phase for the first volume, but the COVID-19 pandemic shut down hopes for a subsequent trip.
North Carolina only had two hospitals at the time of the Civil War – the marine hospital on Portsmouth Island was for seamen, not locals. And “Dix Hill” was the asylum in Raleigh.
Residents received medical care from physicians who made house calls, and only when the family remedies didn’t work.
The whole notion of hospitals to house wounded and sick soldiers during the Civil War was a novel concept. But Sokolosky said that it was during Gen. Grant’s Overlands Campaign that countless sick, wounded and recovering soldiers had to be evacuated away from battlefield hospitals to make room for new casualties.
“They were evacuated to Raleigh and (soon), they’re bustin’ at the seams,” he said. “All those Confederate wounded are coming South.” Thanks to the proximity of the Raleigh & Gaston Railroad, Kittrell seemed a fitting spot to transform a hotel into a hospital and soldiers didn’t have to go all the way to Raleigh.
The government paid rent to business owners or schools for use of the facilities for hospital space. Peace College and Wake Forest College also became sites for hospitals.
And the Confederacy maintained detailed records of what happened in those hospitals – who was treated, who died, which surgeons worked where. Sadly, most of those medical department records were destroyed by fire where they were kept in Richmond.
So Sokolosky has pieced together information by delving into the service records of individual surgeons.
He has found letters and other documents during his research, adding that when he’s able to connect the dots through his research, it’s very satisfying.
“I enjoy the research, especially when the dots come together.”
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