Hessian Camp
18th Century Pennsylvania POW Camp
Hessian Camp also known as Mt. Penn Hessian Camp was a large prisoner of war camp located in the city of Reading, on Mt Penn during the American Revolutionary War. The camp was active from 1776 to 1783 and held up to 1100 prisoners at its most active point in 1781.
Background
The camp was created following the Battle of Trenton on December 26, 1776, to hold Hessian and British prisoners captured during the battle.
It was located originally on the banks of the Schuylkill River, where the prisoners of war were housed in huts along the riverbank. These huts were not properly built, and this caused many problems that would later affect the camp's operation.
During the winter of 1776–77, sickness spread widely among the prisoners and a large number died. These dead were buried at a burial site located at Potter's Field, in mass graves where many men were buried after the waves of sickness swept through the camp.
Following the Battle of Saratoga, it was announced that a new shipment of prisoners was to be brought to the Reading camp. This angered the people of the city, and they demanded that a safer and more secured camp be built further away from the city.
“Hessian Camp” enters the record as 18th Century Pennsylvania POW Camp. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Hessian, Camp and 18th can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Hessian Camp” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Hessian, Camp and 18th provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 22, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q136659523. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1776, 1783, 1100 and 1781.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hessian Camp” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.