by Roger Allen

Guyton has not always been a sleepy little burg: during the War Between the States it was a beehive of activity. There was a major Confederate Hospital, which stretched from Central Boulevard to Highway 119 to Lynn Bond Avenue to Pine Street; there was a major Confederate Military Enlistment encampment at Camp Davis, 2 1/2 miles north of town; and there was a series of railroad tracks that led from the port of Savannah to northern Georgia, where the battles raged.

The Confederate Army had four hospitals scattered around the city of Savannah, a small convalescent camp in Springfield and the General Hospital in Guyton. The Guyton Hospital treated wounded soldiers as early as April of 1862 and continued operating until December 1864. By October of 1862, there was 46 medical staff serving under the command of Dr. William S. Lawton, the Surgeon In Charge.

The hospital was essentially a series of wooden buildings arranged over the campus. There were so many patients coming to the hospital from northern Georgia battlefields, that it wasn’t long before patients were being housed at Whitesville Church (now known as Guyton United Methodist Church). One source states that over 1/2 million meals were served to hospital patients. There were at least 35 soldiers who died while being treated at the hospital.

As the War Between the States heated up, it was decided to open a huge enlistment camp north of town. Named after Confederate President Jeff Davis, Camp Davis’ fields could train as many as four regiments at one time. One field was so large it could hold 5000 troops. Major Edmund Cummings of Guyton was named as the first Operations Officer at the camp.

Archibald Guyton donated 2 acres in 1867 to establish a formal cemetery in order to honor the 26 Confederate soldiers who had not been identified and returned to their families. Each grave has a small marker, and there is a low-slung brick wall with a monument that honors all of those buried. The trustees of the New Hope Providence Baptist Church were made trustees of the cemetery until the city had been formally incorporated when it would be given to the city. The cemetery now sits inside the boundaries of the Guyton Cemetery

According to records, the hospital was abandoned when General Sherman’s 17th Corps, acting in the role of the Union Army’s left wing, approached the town. After Sherman’s’ troops had burned the railroad depot, it’s right of ways, and many other buildings, the entire hospital was disassembled. The lumber was loaded onto flatbed railcars and shipped to a number of different Union Army projects. It turns out that much of the lumber was used in the building of the Beech Institute school for black students in Savannah in 1866.