BGuthrie Photos: MD -- Point Lookout State Park

MD -- Point Lookout State Park:

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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[1] PTLOO_120526_007.JPG	[2] PTLOO_120526_012.JPG	[3] PTLOO_120526_016.JPG	[4] PTLOO_120526_019.JPG	[5] PTLOO_120526_024.JPG	[6] PTLOO_120526_048.JPG	[7] PTLOO_120526_052.JPG	[8] PTLOO_120526_062.JPG
[9] PTLOO_120526_068.JPG	[10] PTLOO_120526_074.JPG	[11] PTLOO_120526_077.JPG	[12] PTLOO_120526_093.JPG	[13] PTLOO_120526_097.JPG	[14] PTLOO_120526_101.JPG	[15] PTLOO_120526_106.JPG	[16] PTLOO_120526_110.JPG
[17] PTLOO_120526_114.JPG	[18] PTLOO_120526_121.JPG	[19] PTLOO_120526_126.JPG	[20] PTLOO_120526_129.JPG	[21] PTLOO_120526_138.JPG	[22] PTLOO_120526_142.JPG	[23] PTLOO_120526_156.JPG	[24] PTLOO_120526_163.JPG
[25] PTLOO_120526_167.JPG	[26] PTLOO_120526_183.JPG	[27] PTLOO_120526_197.JPG	[28] PTLOO_120526_205.JPG	[29] PTLOO_120526_211.JPG	[30] PTLOO_120526_221.JPG	[31] PTLOO_120526_242.JPG	[32] PTLOO_120526_251.JPG
[33] PTLOO_120526_255.JPG	[34] PTLOO_120526_258.JPG	[35] PTLOO_120526_262.JPG	[36] PTLOO_120526_266.JPG	[37] PTLOO_120526_277.JPG	[38] PTLOO_120526_283.JPG	[39] PTLOO_120526_297.JPG	[40] PTLOO_120526_302.JPG

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. PTLOO_120526_068.JPG: "Contraband" Camp: During the Civil War, thousands of enslaved African-Americans escaped from captivity in the South to liberty in the North. The grounds before you once sheltered these freedom-seekers, known at that time as "Contraband." Conditions in the "Contraband Camp" were appalling. Men, women, and children lived half underground in dark, damp, smoky dens. Nurse Sophronia Bucklin described the scene: "A hole from three to four feet deep was dug by them in the black soil, and roofed over with boards, on which turf was closely packed. An opening which admitted them on their hands and feet, and one for the escape of smoke... were the only vents for the impure air and the only openings for light." Nurse Sophronia Bucklin's first -hand accounts of the "Contraband Camp" described men burrowing like "beasts of the field in half-subterranean dens." Changing Fortunes: Some residents of the "Contraband Camp" found jobs at Point Lookout as military service staff or laborers, jettisoning the bonds of slavery for the government payroll.
2. PTLOO_120526_242.JPG: Prison Pen Here you see a partial reconstruction of Camp Hoffman, the largest Union prison camp for Confederate soldiers. Built after the Battle of Gettysburg, it was planned to hold 10,000 prisoners. However, more than five times that number -- 52,000 in all -- were imprisoned here at some point between 1863 and 1865 (the largest one-time prisoner population was about 20,000, in August 1864). Conditions were terrible. In 1865, a prisoner wrote "If it were not for hope, how could we live in a place like this?" If you were lucky, you survived the hunger, the contaminated water, the disease and the weather. But over 3,500 Confederate soldiers did not survive. Remember them along with 1,000 Union soldiers and an unknown number of contrabands who also perished here during the war as you visit this site, reconstructed by the Friends of Point Lookout. Role Reversal: Soldiers of the United States Colored Troops served as prison guards here. The irony of those who had been enslaved guarding former masters was not lost on the troops. One African American soldier was quoted saying "the bottom rail's on top, now".
3. PTLOO_120526_297.JPG: The structure in the distance was said to be a target vessel for nearby naval bombardment practice.
Wikipedia Description: Point Lookout State Park
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Point Lookout is a Maryland state park at the southern tip of St. Mary's County, Maryland. It is a peninsula formed by the confluence of the Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River.

Captain John Smith first explored the Point in 1612. Leonard Calvert used the Point for his personal manor in 1634. During the American Revolution, and again in the War of 1812, it was subject to British raids.

In 1862 during the American Civil War, much of Point Lookout was transformed into a Union prisoner of war camp to hold Confederate captives. Of the 50,000 men held in tents at the Point between 1863 and 1865, according to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, nearly 4,000 died, although this death rate of 8 percent was less than half the death rate among soldiers who were in the field with their own armies.. The camp, originally built to hold 10,000 men, swelled to between 12,000 to 20,000 prisoners after the exchange of prisoners between armies was placed on hold. The result was crowded conditions with up to sixteen men to a tent in poor sanitation conditions. In some cases the guards were former slaves of the prisoners, and this sometimes resulted in brutal or favorable treatment.

Today Point Lookout is a Maryland State Park and retains an original light house built in 1830, a fishing pier, boat launch facilities, public beaches and facilities, overnight camping, Civil War historical remains, and, reputedly, ghosts.
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