The Great Escape

By Rachel Dworkin, Archivist

At 3:30 am on the morning of October 7, 1864, a man emerged from a hole on a side street by the northern fence of the Elmira Prison Camp. He was Washington B. Traweek, a nineteen-year-old private from Alabama who had been captured while serving with the Jeff Davis Artillery. There were Union guards on patrol across the street, but they never noticed him as he snuck along the fence before fleeing around a convenient corner.  He was soon followed by nine other men, the last emerging around 4:30 am. It was the single largest escape from the North’s most secure prisoner-of-war camp. 

The escape plot began on August 24^th when John F. Maull, John P. Putegnat, and Frank E. Saurine all swore a secret oath to dig together. Traweek joined them almost immediately. The four men started digging the tunnel from Maull and Putegnat’s tent located approximately 68 feet from the camp’s northern stockade wall. The digging was exceptionally slow going so they recruited six additional men, S. Cecrops Malone, Gilmer G. Jackson, William H. Templin, J.P. Scruggs, Glen Shelton, and James W. Crawford, to help out.  Berry Benson of South Carolina joined the team in early September after he spotted Traweek disposing of rocks from the tunnel and asked to be let in.

Berry Benson in his old uniform after the war.

The tunnel took months to dig. Two men would go down into the tunnel where one man would dig with a pocket knife while another would load the dirt into a bag made from a spare shirt. The team up top would unload the dirt into their pockets to be disposed of later around camp and then send the bag back down. Working in the tunnel was deeply unpleasant. In his memoir, Benson said it was “next to death by suffocation to go into it.” The tunnel was so narrow that the digger’s body blocked the flow of air leaving the digger sweltering hot and struggling for oxygen. Diggers came up with racking headaches, dizziness, and vomiting and needed to be relieved every 15 to 20 minutes. 

The bag used to move dirt with insets of John P. Putegnat during and after the war.

In mid-September, Traweek and Putegnat dug a second tunnel from the newly constructed hospital, this time with a spade. They made it to the wall in just two nights but, before they could gather their friends to get them out, the tunnel was discovered. Traweek was thrown in the camp’s jail and the guards conducted a camp-wide search for additional tunnels. Twenty-eight were discovered, but not the team’s tunnel which was concealed by a carefully preserved chunk of turf held in place by a plank just below the surface. 

Traweek was released from the camp jail in late September to rejoin his fellows. By this time, Saurine had been kicked off the team for refusing to dig. It turned out to be a bad decision on his part. All of the tunnel conspirators made it out and away. Maull, Jackson, and Templin made their way south together on foot, as did Traweek and Crawford. Somehow Malone and Putegnat got turned around and ended up in Ithaca. They headed still further north before taking jobs in Auburn and using their earnings to travel to Baltimore by train and boat. Benson and Scuggs both made their own ways home alone while Shelton seemingly dropped off the face of the earth.

The escape was discovered during roll call on the morning of October 7^th and threw the camp into an uproar. Guards frantically searched the camp and surrounding area for the tunnel and missing men. Wild rumors circulated among the prisoners. One prison diarist, Wilbur Grambling, wrote that 25 men had escaped, each with a stolen horse. 

Morning roll call at the Elmira Prison Camp

Although many others tried to replicate their feat, theirs was the last successful tunnel escape at the camp. Seven other men managed to make their way to freedom by various other methods. One smuggled himself out in a swill barrel. Another stole a Union sergeant’s overcoat and strolled out the front gate without being challenged. The most brazen escape was by a man named Buttons who faked his own death and jumped out of a coffin on the way to the cemetery.   

Elmira’s Civil War Prison Camp

by Erin Doane, curator

As I looked back at the 151 blog posts we have produced over the last three years, I realized that we have never posted anything about the Civil War prison camp in Elmira.  We’ve done lectures and exhibits and programs about it but never a blog post.  Well, that’s going to change now.

Elmira’s Civil War prison camp, fall 1864

Elmira did not become the location of a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp out of the blue.  On April 23, 1861 the Governor of New York declared Elmira a military depot for western New York.  Two years later the U.S. Government named Elmira a military draft rendezvous.  What became the prison camp started out as one of the four training camps that were created to accommodate the influx of soldiers.  Each camp included barracks, drill fields, and artillery ranges. Over the course of the war 20,796 soldiers were trained in Elmira’s camps.

Rochester battery training at Camp Rathbun, 1863

When prisoner exchanges with the South stopped in 1863, Northern prison camps like Point Lookout Prison in Maryland became very overcrowded.  On May 19, 1864, Camp Rathbun, located on West Water Street in Elmira, was ordered to be changed from a training camp to a prisoner-of-war camp to take in the extra prisoners.  By that time, two of the training camps had already closed and the remaining two were mostly empty.  Over the course of the next two months, a 12 foot tall stockade fence, additional barracks, and a hospital were built to accommodate the arrival of Confederate prisoners.  Foster’s Pond lay at the southern edge of the camp.  It provided the prisoners with water for drinking and bathing but it quickly became a major source of disease.

Drawing of Camp Rathbun, late summer 1864

On July 6, 1864 the first 400 Confederate prisoners-of-war arrived in Elmira.  By August 18 the population was 9,262.  From the beginning, the camp was ill prepared and undersupplied.  A hospital with six wards was built to care for the prisoners but it was not staffed with a chief surgeon until early August.  Outbreaks of measles, scurvy, and waterborne diseases quickly overwhelmed the small staff.  The prison death toll jumped from 11 in July to 115 by the end of August.  Originally designed for 4,000 men in barracks and 1,000 in tents, the prison camp ended up housing nearly 10,000 prisoners at one time.  When a heavy snow storm hit on October 6, more than 5,100 prisoners were still in tents.  Shortages of food, warm clothing, and blankets made prisoners even more likely to fall ill.  One of the most heartbreaking things to me is that there was enough food to properly feed the prisoners but the government decided to cut rations in retaliation against the South for cut rations to Union prisoners.  The North cut rations to punish the South.  The South cut rations because it could not feed its own soldiers.

Elmira's prison camp, 1864

By New Year’s Day of 1865 all prisoners in Elmira were in barracks but the winter was particularly harsh. Temperatures dropped to 18 degrees below zero twice over the winter and nearly two feet of snow fell during a single February storm.  Prisoners were stilled called out for daily inspection despite the freezing temperatures and their lack of proper clothing.  Severe weather, poor sanitation, shortages of food and supplies, and a smallpox outbreak pushed prisoner deaths to a peak of 491 for the month March.  The spring thaw came with record flooding.  On March 15, prisoners retreated to the barracks’ top bunks as waters rose, washing away 2,700 feet of the stockade wall.  With the word of General Lee’s surrender in April, the prison camp began to shut down.  The last 256 prisoners left on July 11, 1865.  Of the 12,147 prisoners held at the camp, 2,961 never returned home.  Elmira had the highest death rate of any Union prison camp.

Prisoner inspection, early 1865