ospital at its height that it stretched from the grounds of today's Veterans Affairs Medical Center to the far side of adjacent Hampton University.
Dozens of buildings housed some 3,500 beds, and a small city of hospital tents pushed that capacity to 5,000 patients. Horse-drawn ambulance cars weaved between these structures, connecting them to the busy Old Point Comfort wharves through a narrow-gauge railway.
Nearly every week the New York Times reported the names of the men who died there, while the American Medical Times described the conditions in the wards and the newest treatments. Illustrations appeared in both Harper's and Leslie's weekly newspapers, while Harper's New Monthly devoted 18 pages to an in-depth feature.
"People have forgotten how large and important this hospital was," says J. Michael Cobb, curator of the Hampton History Museum.
"And when Grant crossed the James River and began the siege of Petersburg in 1864, its location so close to the field of battle made it even more crucial."
Despite its later significance, the Hampton hospital got its start in the small 4-ward clinic that served the garrison of 350 men defending Fort Monroe at the start of the war.
Within days of Virginia's secession, however, the number of troops stationed there grew nearly 10-fold, raising the number of sickbeds needed so quickly that doctors commandeered the Hygeia Hotel and transformed its famous dining room into a surgical ward.
As the Federal presence swelled, so did the need for more hospital space, leading the army to fill the abandoned halls of the 4-story Chesapeake Female Seminary with 500 more stricken soldiers.
That meant the two largest buildings in the region had been seized and repurposed in a desperate response to the unending stream of sick soldiers, Cobb says. But the situation only grew worse with the ferocious Battle of Williamsburg and the campaign that followed.
By early July 1862, the American Medical Times reported the Hampton "hospitals filled to overflowing with the sick and wounded from the 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.