Chimborazo Hospital

Chimborazo Hospital, the "hospital on the hill."

Library of Congress

 

The American Civil War drew several million men to serve the Confederacy or the Union. Many fell sick in unprecedented numbers, and they died from wounds and disease by the hundreds of thousands. Neither side was prepared for the burden of caring for so many sick and wounded. With the sudden burden of caring for so many men, hundreds of hospitals sprouted up around the Confederacy. The five converging railroads near Richmond, Virgina and the city’s proximity to many of the war’s greatest battles meant that Richmond became a booming hospital center.¹

In response to the sudden need to care for a large number of patients, the Confederate government began to build large hospital complexes, starting with Chimborazo. It took its name from the hill on which it sat - Chimborazo Hill, on the eastern edge of the city of Richmond. That hill, in turn, was named for Mount Chimborazo, a 20,549 foot (6,263 meter) mountain in Ecuador.² Alexander von Humboldt had explored Chimborazo earlier in the century and consequently the peak was much better known in the 1800s than it is today.³

When the war started, soldiers from around the Confederacy converged on Richmond for organization and drill. The Confederates had wooden barracks built on Chimborazo Hill with intention of housing newly arrived soldiers over the coming winter. By fall, so many soldiers had become sick that the Surgeon General of the Confederate States of America, Dr. Samuel P. Moore, commandeered the buildings for his department. In October 1861, Chimborazo Hospital was established.⁴

Dr. James B. McCaw, a prominent Richmond surgeon, assumed control of the new hospital. He served as its chief until it ceased operations at the end of the war.⁵ McCaw managed the complex of more than 100 patient wards and support structures as a large military post hospital. Chimborazo operated like a small city, maintaining its own livestock and gardens, producing necessities like bread and soap, as well as providing medical care. A staff of surgeons - usually somewhere between 20 and 30 men- watched over an enormous crowd of patients.⁶ The corps of men who performed the daily nursing consisted of a large contingent of enslaved workers, as well as detailed and disabled Confederate soldiers. A small number of white women also served at Chimborazo, in a position known as matron. Matrons helped feed soldiers, wrote letters for them, administered medicine, organized the kitchens, and directed the labor of the enslaved workers.⁷

The bed capacity at Chimborazo was approximately 3500. On occasion, the number of patients at Chimborazo approached 4000. The majority of men receiving treatment were sick rather than wounded. Chimborazo was not a field hospital, but rather a general hospital where patients received active care while they recovered from illness or wounds. Most wounded soldiers arriving there from the battlefield had been injured several days earlier, had received emergency treatment soon thereafter, and then went to Chimborazo by railroad or ambulance.⁸

Chimborazo operated as a Confederate hospital until April 3, 1865, when United States forces captured Richmond. Approximately 70,000 patients were treated there over the course of three and a half years. About 4,000 of them died. The mortality hovered around 6%.⁹ Men who died at Chimborazo Hospital typically received burial in the Confederate section of the Oakwood Cemetery, one mile northeast of the complex.¹⁰

At the end of the war, African American refugees found shelter in Chimborazo’s wooden barracks buildings. The complex was administered, for a time, by the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (or “Freedmen’s Bureau”) – a federal agency tasked with assisting African Americans in the transition from slavery to freedom.¹¹ Northern aid organizations operated a school for the formerly enslaved.¹² The city of Richmond cleared the land of residents and structures for the formation of a city park in the 1870s. By 1877, it was reported that “all of the old buildings have been removed from Chimborazo Hill within the new park.”¹³

Today Richmond National Battlefield Park uses one portion of the hill for its “Chimborazo Medical Museum,” which is housed in a 20th century building atop the site of the historic hospital. Visitors to the museum will learn about the notable hospital, other hospitals in Civil War Richmond, and about the practice of medicine in the 1860s.

Chimborazo Operating Hours and Seasons

¹ Rebecca Barbour Calcutt, Richmond’s Wartime Hospitals (Pelican Publishing Company, 2005).

² Carol C. Green, Chimborazo: The Confederacy’s Largest Hospital (University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 7-8.

³ Greg Miller, “The Pioneering Maps of Alexander von Humboldt: Beautiful and insightful, the illustrations of the German naturalist helped shape a new understanding of the world,” Smithsonian, October 15, 2009.

⁴ Green, Chimborazo, 8.

⁵ National Park Service, “Dr. James McCaw,” https://www.nps.gov/rich/learn/historyculture/dr-james-mccaw.htm.

⁶ Green, Chimborazo, 19.

⁷ Green, Chimborazo, 46-50.

⁸ Green, Chimborazo, 66.

⁹ Green, Chimborazo, 114, 154.

¹⁰ “THE DEAD AT OAKWOOD – WORK OF THE OAKWOOD ASSOCIATION,” Richmond Dispatch, June 5, 1867.
“HISTORY OF CHIMBORAZO HOSPITAL, C. S. A.,” Richmond News Leader, January 7, 1909.

¹¹ “Colonel Brown’s Report,” Washington (Pa.) Reporter, August 26, 1865.

¹² “Misses Cooke’s School Room, Chimborazo Hospital, Richmond, Va.,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 17, 1866, 132.

¹³ “TRUSTEES’ SALE OF LARGE NUMBER OF HANDSOME BUILDING LOTS ON CHIMBORAZO HEIGHTS, ADJOINING THE NEW CITY PARK,” Richmond Dispatch, June 13, 1877.

 

Savage Smith Map of Chimborazo Hospital

Library of Virginia