I have just read with great interest the year-long thread on Confederate prisoners and Galvanized Yankees.
I wished I had been aware of your site much earlier. I just stumbled onto it by search engine looking for Confederates captured during the Chattanooga Campaign, especially Missionary Ridge. For years I have been working on gathering information on Confederate prisoners at Rock Island, Confederate dead buried at Rock Island, and the Confederates prisoners who took the oath and enlisted in Union Army for frontier service. I first became interested while in the Army and stationed at Rock Island Arsenal, the site of the former prison. The Cemetery is just off the road on one of the Island exits. I started then, with a list I obtained from the Historian at Rock Island, to gather information on the Confederates buried there. Some time after I retired from the Army I was appointed by the Governor to be the Superintendent of the "Old Soldiers Home" at Fort Dodge, KS. Fort Dodge was a military fort, officially established on the Santa Fe trail in April 1865. The fort closed after 10 years or so, and in 1890 it was given to Kansas to become a home for Union Civil War veterans. It still serves as a hospital, assisted-living and nursing home care center for approximately 400 veterans.

When I first was appointed to Fort Dodge, and moved into our quarters, the "Custer House," built of native limestone in 1867, I got extremely interested in the forts history and the history of the units that served there. I immediately came across the fact that the first troops to occupy Fort Dodge in April 1865, were two companies of the 2nd U.S. Volunteers, Galvanized Yankees who had been recruited at Rock Island, whose Confederate Cemetery I had been working on for several years. My interest immediately expanded to include the Galvanized Yankees.

I have been away from Fort Dodge for several years and am fully retired now, working almost full-time on compiling military and genealogical information on Rock Island Confederates. All this chatter is just to get to the fact that I would appreciate hearing from any of you who have a special interest in or a family connection to the Rock Island Confederates. I will eventually be placing all I compile online with free and easy access. I expect it to take me about 4 more months to complete the research and get the website up. The easy part is done, 80% of the group. The rest are proving very difficult to track down. I know I will never find anything on a few. Eventually, as I get to the deadline I have set for myself, I will just have to publish what I have and edit later if more comes in. Anyway, you sound like a great group. Glad I found you. - Stan Reed stan.reed@yahoo.com