From the Richmond Examiner, 3/15/1866, p. 3, c. 3

CASTLE THUNDER is done for finally and for good as a military prison post, unless we happen to have another war. Yesterday all the female negro prisoners were removed, and with them went the guards. Yesterday afternoon the immense doors, keyless and lockless and boltless, swung on their hinges; the rows of windows, innocent of glass, showed no anxiously peering faces. Castle Thunder, that pandemonium – that focus to which, in Confederate times, tended all the rampant villainy of the army, is a silent tobacco factory again, and from its portals, from whence have issued an hundred thousand men – scores to the execution ground, to die by rope and musket – come now a busy stream of industrious negroes, cleaning up and washing out the Augean stables of the late Confederacy.

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