Camp Dick Robinson - Second Phase

Second Phase

In August 1862, Confederate Maj. Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith entered Kentucky with 12,000 troops that he advanced against Richmond and Lexington. Kirby Smith ordered the dispersal of the Garrard County Home Guard on September 27, and Maj. Gen. Braxton Bragg directed that the Confederate depot at Danville "be transferred as rapidly as practicable to Bryantsville and Camp Dick Robinson, where all supplies will in the future be concentrated." Bragg then ordered the establishment of "a camp of instruction for new troops . . . at or near the site of Old Camp Dick Robinson, to be known as Camp Breckinridge." The recruits were to form at Bryantsville and report to Simon Bolivar Buckner who had arms and ammunition ready to issue to them. Some ten days later, Bragg discovered during the bloody Battle of Perryville the Army of the Ohio outnumbered him and he chose to withdraw from Kentucky. On October 13, his troops departed from Camp Breckinridge. Three days later, the Third Regiment Ohio Volunteer Cavalry arrived at Camp Dick Robinson and found Col. W. A. Hoskins in charge of stores abandoned by the Confederate Army. In the early spring of 1863, plans to conduct the long-neglected East Tennessee expedition led to Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside's becoming commander of the newly reformed Army of the Ohio. Those troops departed from Camp Nelson on August 12, and nine days later, 'the largest concourse ever assembled in Garrard County" observed the re-interment of William “Bull” Nelson behind the original headquarters home at Camp Dick Robinson.