The Patterson Homestead located between First and River Avenues at the edge of Chester Park.  The house was demolished as part of the Hutchinson River Parkway project.  Photo from the Patterson Family Materials, Pelham Town Historian Collection, courtesy of Mary Ellen P. Kunst and the Patterson Family.

The U.S. Army with just 24,593 soldiers was woefully under-manned for war with Spain.  President William McKinley sent out a call for 125,000 volunteers, which was authorized by Congress on April 22, 1898.  A month later, the President issued a second call for 75,000 more.  Pelhamites Harry Patterson and Gardner Minard were among those who answered the call, enlisting with the 8th New York Volunteer Infantry, Company G.  But before they and the vast number of other soldiers could be shipped off to fight in Cuba or the Philippines, they would need to be trained.  Makeshift camps were set up, including one at Fort Thomas in Chickamauga Park, Tennessee, where tens of thousands of soldiers descended from all parts of the country.  Among them were Harry and Gardner.

“Fort” Thomas was little more than an open field with a few primitive structures located on a former Civil War battlefield that had been preserved, like Gettysburg, as a park.  Enlisted men like Harry and Gardner slept on the ground in tents.  There were shallow latrines, but many were not averse to making the open ground their facilities for relieving themselves.  Bathing took place in ponds and streams from which the soldiers also drank.  By the end of May, 1898 there were nearly 50,000 men at the camp.  It was not long before the unsanitary conditions led to outbreaks of disease, usually misdiagnosed as Malaria or Dysentery, but which was actually an epidemic of Typhoid fever.  About 22% of those stationed at Fort Thomas contracted Typhoid.  The death rate was 7.3%.  The camp was barely satisfactory for training; it was in no way prepared for providing hospital care for thousands of severely ill.

With the heat of the summer, conditions at Chickamauga deteriorated further and newspapers across the country began reporting on the fate of its soldiers.  The New York Times carried a report of an officer returning from the camp under the headline “Awful Suffering at Camp Thomas.”  “Boiling over with indignation” and speaking “with great vehemence and force,” he stated that, while one might expect a sick soldier to welcome going to a hospital, at Camp Thomas it is seen as “the house of doom.”   Medical supplies, thermometers, nurses and even cold water were in short supply.  There was virtually no ice to help bring down the fevers of stricken soldiers.   When he went to visit one of the men from his company in the hospital, he stated:

"I nearly staggered with horror.  The man’s face was literally black with flies. His mouth, which was open – the poor fellow was too weak to close it – was filled with flies…. The person in charge nonchalantly remarked that there were not enough nurses to go around…. In another case, a man who died in the division hospital was found to be literally alive with maggots under his armpits, and his dying agonies were intensified by the movements of these vermins [sic].  There are other shocking cases of neglect which are too horrible to be recounted."