This month, we're exploring the intersection of history and local communities with stories about events that brought the American Revolution into people's backyards—or barnyards, churchyards, and warehouses. Whether it was Benedict Arnold sitting at your breakfast table or a ragtag army of POWs suddenly deposited on the outskirts of Charlottesville, for many Americans, the experience of the war was remarkably personal and close to home.
Read on to learn more about the times that the Revolution came home. And when you're done, be sure to play our exclusive Virginia History Timeline Game.
The Albemarle Barracks was a prisoner-of-war camp located outside of Charlottesville that housed British and Hessian prisoners captured during the Battles of Saratoga in the autumn of 1777. The captives, approximately 4,000 men, women, and children, were initially held near Boston. In November 1778, this Convention Army, named for the Convention of Saratoga, was marched south to Virginia because of strain on local supply chains and fear that the British would attempt to free the prisoners. The prisoners arrived in January 1779 at the Albemarle Barracks, a camp of crudely constructed log huts about five miles northwest of Charlottesville.
Did you ever wonder how Charlottesville's Barracks Road got its name or why a nearby neighborhood is called Hessian Hills? Join Encyclopedia Virginia Managing Editor Patti Miller and Travis Shaw, Director of Education at the Virginia Piedmont Heritage Area, to find out how Barracks Road got its name and the story of the Revolutionary War POWs who called Charlottesville home. Co-sponsored by the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society.
Follow the incredible 700-mile journey of the "Convention Army"—the British and Hessian POWs and their families marched from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Charlottesville in the winter of 1778–1789 with our exclusive Convention Army story map.
"Colonel Arnold" courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division
In the winter of 1780–1781, turncoat general Benedict Arnold led a raid into Virginia aimed at disrupting supplies bound for the Continental Army in the Carolinas and establishing a British base in the Chesapeake Bay area. Arnold moved up the James River on December 31, 1780, landing at Westover Plantation on January 4, 1781, before marching on Richmond. At Richmond, Arnold’s forces destroyed military stores and the state foundry, burned warehouses, and plundered private property. At the same time, hundreds of enslaved people seized the opportunity to escape and seek freedom with the British.
