Page "Demopolis, Alabama" Paragraph 24

With the start of the Civil War, several Confederate companies drew heavily from the population of the Demopolis area and Marengo County.

These included the 4th, 11th, 21st, 23rd, and 43rd Alabama Infantry Regiments in addition to the 8th Alabama Cavalry, Company E of the Jeff Davis Legion, and Selden's Battery.

During the course of the war, more of these men would be lost to exhaustion, disease, and malnutrition than to battle.

The city itself, on two navigable rivers and a railroad, became home to a number of Confederate installations and offices.

These included commissary and quartermaster offices and warehouses, engineers ' offices and workshops, a large ordnance depot, two large hospitals, offices of the medical purveyor of the Department of Alabama, Mississippi, and East Louisiana, and a huge military encampment at the fairgrounds in Webb's Bend.

These brought in thousands of soldiers into town at a time, one that had a had just over a thousand of its own inhabitants prior to the war, putting an enormous strain on food and accommodations in the town.

Many hundreds of the soldiers who died in the hospitals during the war were buried in a Confederate cemetery on the south end of Webb's Bend, but the site is under water today, following the damming of the river below Demopolis in the 20th century.