battlefields about Richmond."
Though construction had started on a huge new "pavilion hospital" made up of more than two dozen large detached wards, the workmen couldn't keep pace with the deluge that poured in as the army abandoned Harrison's Landing in August.
"Near the end, the Hampton hospital was like the drain for the whole campaign," says Terry Reimer, director of research for the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Maryland.
"The Union was evacuating the sick and wounded as fast as it could. It was just insane."
Just how overwhelming can be seen in the reports of Army of the Potomac medical director Jonathan Letterman, who moved patients to Hampton by the thousands.
Yet despite his complaints about the hospital's unfinished state, it was still far better than the field hospitals left behind.