Libby Prison: Richmond Warehouse, Tunnel Escape and a Chicago Museum

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Libby Prison began as a three-story brick warehouse on the James River in Richmond, leased by Captain Luther Libby and his son for a ship grocery and supply business. The Confederacy requisitioned it, and by 1862 it held captured Union officers in eight rooms about 100 by 40 feet, with barred windows that had no glass. Meant for about 700, it held well over 1,000 by 1863, as men from battles like Chickamauga arrived and meat disappeared from the diet in favor of sweet potatoes and poor cornbread.

Prisoners kept up morale with the Libby Chronicle, read aloud every Friday, and could send letters only six lines long. After two failed tunnels, officers dug more than 50 feet from the basement to a carriage shed, and on February 9, 1864, 109 men escaped, just over half reaching Union lines. After Richmond fell, Lincoln visited and favored keeping the building as a memorial, but in 1889 candy maker Charles F. Gunther moved it brick by brick to Chicago as a war museum, which was torn down by 1899.

Captured Black soldiers were denied prisoner of war status and sent to forced labor on Richmond's fortifications.
Union officials declined to send food into Richmond, fearing it would ease the Confederacy's supply burden.
The tunnelers reached the basement by cutting through a hospital room floor to a closed-off stairway.
Gunther rebuilt the prison inside a castellated wall and charged admission.
The Chicago site later held a coliseum used for political conventions, and some prison nails were melted into a souvenir bell for the Jamestown Exposition.

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