The Captain Who Plowed a Prison Camp
In the spring of 1864, Union prisoners at Camp Ford in Texas watched an unlikely farm take shape beyond the stockade. Twenty men leaned into a plow while an older, gray-haired captain directed the work. The ten-acre patch of corn and beans was his answer to hunger—and only one chapter in the remarkable life of Captain John Wesley Watts.
Born September 1, 1820, in Scott County, Indiana, Watts came with his family to a farm near Chauncey in Lawrence County, Illinois. After his father Arthur died in 1845, John surrendered his claim to the family real estate so his brothers Isaac and Martin could support their mother, Nancy, and educate four younger siblings. He married Phebe Culbertson in 1846, served as Lawrence County sheriff from 1854 to 1856, and ran for the Illinois legislature in 1858.
By 1860, the census found Watts working as a hotel keeper in Sumner. The household was a small cross-section of a changing town: his children and brother Harvey lived alongside telegraph operators, physicians, an artist, a gunsmith, servants, and other boarders under the management of his sister-in-law, Rebecca Culbertson.
War changed everything. When President Abraham Lincoln called for volunteers, Watts and Harvey joined the 8th Illinois Infantry. Watts soon raised a company of his own. Illinois had already filled its quota, so he led the Lawrence County recruits to St. Louis, where they became Company G of the 7th Missouri Infantry. The volunteers elected Watts captain; his brother Martin became second lieutenant, and another brother Felix enlisted as a private.
Typhoid fever nearly ended his service near Boonville, Missouri. His 14-year-old son, John Culbertson Watts, traveled from home to care for him, and Watts resigned in April 1862. By September he had recovered enough to recruit Company I of the 130th Illinois Infantry. His underage son secretly enlisted in another company of the regiment; when Watts discovered the deception, he arranged the boy’s transfer to Company I so he could “keep an eye on him.” The younger John later contracted typhoid and was discharged.
On April 8, 1864, Watts and most of his company were captured at Mansfield, Louisiana, then marched to Camp Ford near Tyler, Texas. In a letter to his mother, he wrote that the prisoners were penned “like cattle” and that no living man had words for their suffering.
Yet fellow prisoners remembered “Uncle John Watts” less for despair than for action. He persuaded the prison commander to let the men fence ten acres outside the walls and plant corn and beans. Another officer later said Watts saved lives by taking quinine from the surgeon’s office for sick prisoners. Because both Watts and the commander were Masons, he could move more freely around the grounds—an advantage he risked for others. He also worked for nearby farmers, earning four dollars a day to buy food for his company.
After the war, roughly 1,200 Union prisoners began the long journey home. Watts returned to find his lumber business and much of his property gone. In 1870 he was living on a Sumner farm with Phebe, who had suffered a stroke, and their daughter Nancy. Later he joined his son in southeastern Missouri to sell lumber and raise cotton. Working in the swamps in November 1875, he developed pneumonia and died on November 25. His burial place remains unknown.
Phebe died the following year in Doniphan, Missouri. In Sumner, veterans preserved the captain’s name in the Captain John W. Watts Post of the Grand Army of the Republic—a fitting tribute to a man remembered not merely for commanding soldiers, but for feeding, treating, and protecting them when survival itself became the battle.
