Membership

“Encampment of the Convention Army,” an etching originally published in London in 1789. After the critical American victory in the Battles at Saratoga, New York in October 1777— a turning point in the War for Independence— thousands of British and their allied Hessian soldiers were taken prisoner. After having been kept in Cambridge for a year, nearly 4,000 of the enemy troops were marched hundreds of miles south to be kept in a rural area of Albemarle County, west of the town of Charlottesville. They arrived in the winter, January 1779 to what one survivor described as “truly horrible” conditions. This “Convention Army” established a prisoner of war camp known as the “Albemarle Barracks.” In 1781, as British forces marched on Virginia, the prisoners of war at the Barracks were moved north to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where they remained until released in 1783. The western road, from Charlottesville out to the Albemarle Barracks, is to this day still referred to as Barracks Road.