Cartoons from the WWI boot camp hospital in Charlotte, N.C. (Camp Greene)
Late last year, the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center posted a batch of documents online from the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library that “includes an interesting look at life during World War I in North Carolina–documented through newspapers.”
I browsed through the issues of The Caduceus last night. This newspaper was published from the Base Hospital at Camp Greene in Charlotte, N.C. While the Queen City is a major banking center today, it was just another quiet cotton mill town with a few churches in 1917. Then the U.S. declared war on Germany 100 years ago yesterday (April 6, 1917), and Charlotte became a military training camp with a base hospital publishing its own newspaper just a little over a year later. The first issue of The Caduceus was published on May 25, 1918 with the above cartoon introducing the paper to its readers. In the same issue, they poked a little fun at some of their patients…
And then at the sometimes conflicting demands of patient care and military decorum…
And, of course, at the cooks...
Or, sometimes just “The Cook”…
As well as the Officers…
And the enlisted men and dogs…
And eventually, the thousands of black soldiers who had arrived on base…
“Few people had expected any black troops to be sent to a southern camp, but at one time 14,000 black troops from Massachusetts and Connecticut were stationed there.” — NCPedia
As even the Germans…
Even after the war ended (in November, 1988) and into the new year…
But there’s a lot more than just cartoons in the paper. And as their blog post indicates, it does provide some insights into “events happening at the camp specifically, as opposed to the national and war updates given by other papers” of the time. To browse all 38 issues of The Caduceus, start here.
If you enjoyed this post, please click to recommend it. And check out my eBook about my German-American ancestors in the Catawba River Valley of NC…
