Camp Curtin (Harper’s Weekly, 1861; public domain).

Established just north of the Pennsylvania State Capitol building in Harrisburg by Pennsylvania’s Civil War-era governor, Andrew Gregg Curtin, on April 18, 1861—just three days after the fall of Fort Sumter to Confederate States Army troops—and initially named “Camp Union,” Camp Curtin was a key staging and training point for the United States Army at the dawn of the American Civil War. Within a few short months of its creation on eighty acres of land that had previously been used for Dauphin County’s Agricultural Fairgrounds, this camp site became the largest military facility in Pennsylvania and the nation during the war.

It was here, in mid-August of 1861, that new recruits and seasoned soldiers, who had just recently completed their Three Months’ duty, came together to form the newly-created 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry. 

After completing weeks of grueling, basic training in light infantry tactics, the members of the 47th Pennsylvania were personally given their regiment’s First State Color by Governor Curtin on September 20, 1861. An American flag emblazoned with the regiment’s state name and volunteer unit number, that flag was kept safe by the regiment’s color-bearer unit, Company C, from that moment until the regiment returned home to Pennsylvania nearly five long years later.

Camp Cadwalader and the German Hospital, 1876 (David Johnston Kennedy, courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, public domain).

Arriving at Camp Cadwalader in Philadelphia in early 1866, the majority of the surviving 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers were given their final discharge papers on January 9, 1866, after having been officially mustered out from the regiment at its duty station in Charleston, South Carolina on Christmas Day in 1865.

This latter camp was named after Major-General George Cadwalader (1806-1879), a native of Philadelphia who had been appointed by Governor Curtin as Major-General of the Pennsylvania Volunteers at the beginning of the American Civil War.

To learn more about each of these Union Army facilities, read these camp profiles:

• Camp Curtin (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania); and
• Camp Cadwalader (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania).