When the first shipment of men from Fort Fisher arrived in Elmira on Monday, 30 January 1865, the weather was bitterly cold and the snow was deep. Private Thaddeus C. Davis, from Morehead City, NC 3rd, Co. G, 40th Regiment, 3rd N.C., recalled after the war, "We arrived (at Elmira) about eight o'clock in the evening, in four feet of snow, and many prisoners had neither blankets nor coats."
The Union Army inspecting officer at the prison, Lt. James R. Reid, wrote in February 1865, "The Fort Fisher prisoners arrived in cold weather very depressed, poorly clad, and great numbers were soon taken sick with pneumonia and diarrhea, rapidly assuming a typhoid character."
In February 1865, there was a prisoner exchange and most of the sick at Elmira Prison were sent to the James River in Virginia for exchange.
Of the 1,121 Fort Fisher men sent to Elmira, 518 would die in five months of which 372 were North Carolinians. Of that number, 319 did at Elmira and were buried in the Confederate section of the Woodlawn National Cemetery in Elmira.
Fifty-three of the sick Tar Heel soldiers who were paroled either died in transit or died very soon in various hospitals in Richmond, Virginia, Raleigh, Greensboro, Weldon and Charlotte, North Carolina.
--Old B-Runner
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