Ransom Vick, Jr. 10th Mississippi Infantry Company I

This page is dedicated to my great great uncle Ransom.

This page is to be an informational page for the ancestors of those who died at the Confederate Hospital at Lauderdale Springs Mississippi. My great great uncle made it through the Battle of Shilo, but caught the flu while in Corinth Mississippi, during the Siege of Corinth he was sent by the M&O Railroad to the Lauderdale Springs Hospital, where on 25 June 1862 he died, his last muster roll card stated "absent, in hospital somewhere on the m&o railroad."

History of the Lauderdale Springs Confederate Hospital

A concern for health, and a growing amount of leisure afforded by the pre-war prosperity, helped spark the popularity of Lauderdale Springs, where a resort and health spa attracted crowds from far and near. As early as 1843, Major David Gavin noted that Lauderdale Springs, sometimes refereed to as White Sulphur Springs, had become a popular gathering spot.Tales of healing powers of the springs had made the spot a magnet for Indians and early settlers. The springs were, and remain, unique in that each of the several spouts flowing near each other produces a different type of water. By the early 1850's, Lauderdale Springs wilder side had been tamed as it grew into a favorite resort for the polite society of the day. The refuge from the summers heat by then was offering more sophisticated amusement. In addition to the main hotel, the resort complex featured cottages and bath houses, and also a large dance pavilion. Lauderdale escaped actual battle, but other gruesome realities of war--Confederate hospitals-- were present in the county. Signifying the blow the war brought to the antebellum-era good times, the resort at Lauderdale Springs was transformed into a hospital, the trains that brought in caravans of tourist in the 1850's bringing wounded soldiers to the converted inn instead. At the hospital the mineral water was now used to treat soldiers as they had been used by Indians years before. The two-story hospital was usually crowded with sick and wounded Confederates brought from battlefields to the north via the Mobile and Ohio tracks. Next to the hospital was the dreaded "death house," where soldiers lived out there last moments. Up a hill from the "death house" a cemetery was established for the hundreds who died at Lauderdale Springs. The cemetery, now owned by the Winnie Davis Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Chapter 24, became the final resting place for more than 1,200 Confederate soldiers and 80 who wore Yankee Blue. Most of the buried fought in battles at Shill, Cornith, Iuka, Jackson, Bakers Creek, Vicksburg, Forest and other North Mississippi Battlefields. Another illustration of the wars cost in terms of human suffering and deprivation can bee seen in the story of the Confederate Orphans Home once located at Lauderdale Springs. After the war, wounded soldiers were no longer brought into the former resort building near the springs. However, other victims of the war--destitute orphans--did find a home there. According to an account by Mary J. Welsh, an orphanage that "differed in many ways from every other home of the kind in Mississippi either before or since the war" was established there by the Mississippi State Baptist Association in 1865.

Special thanks to Robert Overton Jr, and the staff of the Lauderdale County Department of Archives and History, Inc. for the information on the Lauderdale Springs Confederate Hospital.