Vickie Betts and I have been researching Camp Ford and union POW's in Texas for a number of years. We have amassed a large bibliography, including exchange lists, and probably every regimental history, diary, or other similar account that Vicki's genius for finding has been able to find. We have created a data base of prisoners from Camp Ford and from Camp Groce that contains nearly 5,700 names with dates and places of capture and dates of exchange, death, and escape. We have never seen any references to any prisoners being held at, or sent to Bonham. We can identify 1,808 prisoners held at Tyler who were captured in Arkansas. Of these 1,160, the single largest group were captured at Marks' Mills. One hundred and ten of these were sent to Camp Groce and exchanged at Galveston in December 1864. This figure is probably low because of undocumented deaths at that Camp.

A recommendation was made in February 1865 that the Camp be moved to Navarro county because of the exhaustion of supplies in Smith County. Obviously that was never done. Col. Ignatius Sysmanski was the CS Commissioner of exchange for the Trans-Mississippi. There is no correspondence from him relating to prisoners at Bonham. On one of the trips to the National Archives, we identified and copied all of the exchange lists from the Trans-Mississippi with the exception of the lists of the 8th US prisoners captured at San Antonio. None of them dealt with any prisoners from Bonham. These included: 1. Enlisted men taken at Galveston, 2, enlisted men captured at Brashear City in June 1863, 3. a field exchange after the engagements in the Opelousas area in November 1863, 4., an exchange of badly wounded prisoners from Mansfield and Pleasant Hill, 5, exchanges from Camp Ford in July and October 1864, and February and May 1865, and 6., exchanges from Camp Groce in December 1864.

Sysmanski was diligent in effecting exchanges as it meant returning CS prisoners back in the field. Had there been an extra thousand union prisoners in Texas, he would have pushed to trade them back.

In short, I do not believe that there were ever any Union prisoners in Bonham.