Camp Groce: A Civil War POW Camp

Two miles east of Hempstead, on land belonging to the wealthy planter Leonard Groce, the Confederacy ran one of Texas's Civil War prisoner-of-war camps. Camp Groce began in 1862 as a training camp for Confederate recruits, but by 1863 it had become a prison for Union soldiers and sailors captured in the coastal battles at Galveston and Sabine Pass. This driving tour traces that history across the Groce family's plantation country: the camp site, the Groce lands, the grand house at Liendo, and a later campsite tied to General Custer's postwar occupation of Texas. The POW history is told here factually and with dignity — these were documented events in a hard war, and scholarship notes that, difficult as conditions were, prisoners here fared somewhat better than in many Civil War prisons. Several stops are on or near private land, so read them from public roads and respect all boundaries.