Albemarle Barracks

This illustration from the second volume of Travels Through the Interior Parts of America, (1789), a published collection of letters from British officer Thomas Anburey, shows the Albemarle Barracks, which housed captured British and German soldiers following British general John Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga. The barracks consisted of about 300 log huts, around twenty-four feet long by fourteen feet wide, each of which reportedly held up to eighteen people. Anburey described the huts as “extremely dangerous,” as insects turned the interior of the logs to “saw-dust.” The Albemarle Barracks housed soldiers from January 1779 to late 1780.