In January 1779, a column of British soldiers, German mercenaries, and their families - perhaps four thousand people in total - finished a forced march from Massachusetts and arrived at a half-built prison camp in the Piedmont hills outside Charlottesville, Virginia. The barracks were barely habitable. The provisions were inadequate. So the prisoners did what people forced into a settlement do. They built a church. They opened a coffeehouse. They put up a theater. They opened pubs. Albemarle Barracks - the prison camp the Continental Congress had improvised - became, briefly, one of the more curious small towns in Revolutionary America.
On October 17, 1777, British General John Burgoyne surrendered his army at the Battle of Saratoga, signing a Convention with the American Major General Horatio Gates that promised the British and German troops would be paroled back to Europe. The Continental Congress repudiated the agreement. What was supposed to be a quick evacuation became indefinite imprisonment. The Convention Army - several thousand British and German troops, including Hessian and Brunswickian mercenaries fighting for the British - was first marched to Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Massachusetts provisions ran short. In late 1778 the prisoners were marched south. Congressional member John Harvie offered land on his property outside Charlottesville near Ivy Creek, and the Convention Army arrived there in January 1779.
The camp population at peak was around 2,000 British soldiers, upwards of 1,900 Germans, and roughly 300 women and children traveling with the army. The barracks were inadequate. Officers were paroled to live as far away as Richmond and Staunton, lodging with sympathetic families and even attending dinners at Monticello with Thomas Jefferson, who treated his prisoner guests with deliberate civility. The enlisted men and the camp followers built a community out of their materials. The log huts they raised against winter. The church they built for services. The coffeehouse, the pubs, and a theater where they performed plays in English and German. Some prisoners worked Virginia farms for wages. Some traded with local merchants. The camp functioned, more than it should have, as an improvised refugee town.
The camp's basic problem never went away. There were not enough guards, not enough food, not enough housing. Hundreds of prisoners escaped over the course of the camp's two-year life - some fleeing to British lines, some simply walking away to lose themselves in the American population. Hessian and Brunswickian soldiers in particular, having little quarrel with the British or the Americans, sometimes chose to stay. Their descendants would become part of the German-American population of the Virginia Piedmont. The Americans, for their part, struggled to feed an unexpected community of four thousand people in what was supposed to be a temporary holding camp. As the British army advanced northward from the Carolinas in late 1780, threatening to liberate the prisoners, the remaining Convention Army soldiers were moved to Frederick, Maryland, Winchester, Virginia, and other interior locations.
The site of Albemarle Barracks is now on private property northwest of downtown Charlottesville, at the foot of Barracks Farm Road. A Virginia state historical marker on Barracks Road commemorates the location. In 1983, when the surrounding land was being developed for residential use, workers discovered several graves believed to be those of Convention Army prisoners. The Albemarle County Historical Society erected a plaque at the burial site on what is now Ivy Farm Drive. The plaque sits in a private yard a few hundred yards from where Ivy Farm Drive separates from Barracks Farm Road. Through the early 2000s the marker was nearly hidden by overgrown boxwoods on either side; by November 2010 it could again be easily seen from the road. The men and women buried there were soldiers in the wrong army, dying in a country they had not chosen to fight in, far from any home they would recognize.
Located at 38.10 degrees north, 78.51 degrees west, in the Ivy Creek area northwest of Charlottesville, Virginia. From 3,000 to 5,000 feet AGL the area reads as suburban Piedmont development on rolling terrain. The original camp site is no longer visually distinct. Nearest airports include Charlottesville-Albemarle (KCHO) just to the east and Shenandoah Valley Regional (KSHD) to the west across the Blue Ridge.