Agloomy and tragic scene—one with which the inhabitants of the oft-contested city of Winchester, Va., were unfortunately all too familiar—unfolded throughout the night of September 19, 1864, as thousands of casualties from the Third Battle of Winchester were brought to makeshift hospitals throughout the community. “All the wounded,” reported Surgeon James T. Ghiselin, the Army of the Shenandoah’s medical director, were taken to “churches, public buildings, and such private dwellings as were suitable.” It did not take long for Ghiselin to realize that the 40 structures transformed into ersatz hospitals would be insufficient to handle the army’s casualties, which exceeded 4,000 troops. Ghiselin also understood these spaces would be further strained with additional casualties as Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan’s Army of the Shenandoah pursued Lt. Gen. Jubal Early’s Confederates south toward Fisher’s Hill. Sheridan’s medical director quickly realized that the time had come to implement a plan, developed several weeks earlier, to transport hundreds of tents to Winchester and construct what would be known as the Sheridan Field Hospital—the largest hospital of its kind constructed during the Civil War.
The day after the battle Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes ordered Surgeon John Brinton “to proceed without delay to Winchester” and supervise the construction of “a large tent hospital…to be of a capacity of four to five thousand beds.” The following night Brinton arrived in Winchester. While erecting “500 tents…was no slight matter,” as Brinton asserted, the task of erecting the Sheridan Field Hospital was completed on September 29, 1864, with the support of approximately 500 troops from Colonel Oliver Edwards’ brigade. After the hospital’s construction, and in the ensuing weeks, a bevy of civilians, including relief agents from the U.S. Christian Commission and nurses arrived to aid in caring for the wounded. Among them was Jane Boswell Moore.
Moore, a native of Baltimore, Md., who at the war’s outset aided wounded and sick Union soldiers brought to the city, believed that
