The story of Gloucester County Confederate soldier Robert Henry Gwynn, captured near Richmond in 1864 and sent to Union prison camp Elmira in New York, where he died, was told to members of the Gloucester Genealogical Society of Virginia on Monday.
The society met in the Main Street branch of the Gloucester Public Library. Rob Garnett, a descendant of Gwynn, told the story and said that the Elmira prison camp “had a mortality rate of roughly a quarter of its occupants, from dysentery, exposure, malnutrition, and illness, precipitated by General U. S. Grant’s decision with President Lincoln’s approval to stop prisoner exchanges,” a release said.
Robert H. Gwynn’s name is among those on the Confederate Memorial in Gloucester Court House. The memorial was erected on Sept. 18, 1889, when the Gloucester community had recovered enough from the war to afford the expense of memorializing its war dead.
Garnett was born and raised in Gloucester. He earned a bachelor...