Major General Thomas West Sherman Camp no. 1, SUVCW
The Lovell General Hospital Memorial Marker Fund
10,593 patients treated. 308 deaths recorded. No marker stands today.
From 1862 to 1865, the Lovell General Hospital at Portsmouth Grove treated more than ten thousand Union and Confederate soldiers on the shores of Aquidneck Island. It was one of the largest military hospitals in the country, ranked twelfth of 183 nationwide by bed capacity.
Katharine Prescott Wormeley, a Newport resident, directed the hospital's 1,700 beds as its Lady Director beginning in August 1862. She had already served on the Virginia front lines and aboard hospital transport ships before taking on the role. Disabled veterans of the Hospital Guards, men no longer fit for front line service, stood watch over the wards until the day the hospital closed.
When the war ended in 1865, the buildings were dismantled and carried away for lumber. The men who died there were buried on site, then moved to Cypress Hills National Cemetery in Brooklyn in 1868. Today the site sits quiet near the Melville Marina, and nothing there tells its story.
Sherman Camp no. 1 is raising funds for a granite monument in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, to permanently mark this ground and the soldiers, nurses, and surgeons who served there.
10,593
Patients treated
1700
Beds at capacity
Give to the marker fund Sherman Camp no. 1 is a 501(c)3 nonprofit. Gifts are tax-deductible and go directly toward the Portsmouth granite monument.
Archival photographs courtesy of the Library of Congress, Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs. Photographed on site by J.A. Williams, 1862–1865.
