“BACK FROM BATTLE” – The Forgotten Story of Pennsylvania’s Camp Discharge and the Weary Civil War Soldiers It Served” – A new book by co-authors Jim Remsen and Brad Upp

Historian Jim Remsen will give an illustrated presentation about this brand new book, released in September 2021. The book has been nominated for a Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History award. 

Camp Discharge was erected in 1864 in Lower Merion, on a slope above the Schuylkill River. It had a special mission – to muster out hundreds of individual soldiers from Eastern Pennsylvania who had been cut off from their regiments in the field. Some of the men had been waylaid by battle wounds or illness, others by detached duty. A few were deserters, while nearly half were POWs who had been held at Andersonville and elsewhere. By 1866, the post was gone, and the men had gone on to their uncertain futures in post Civil War America.

Jim Remsen is a retired Inquirer journalist, author of three prior books, and a past presenter at the GAR Museum.

Brad Upp, who is unavailable for this program, is the book’s co-author, a re-enactor with the 69th Pennsylvania Infantry, and a board member of the Lower Merion Historical Society, which supported the development of the book.