From the Shreveport (La.) Semi-Weekly News, 5/26/1866, p. 2, c. 4

[beginning of column torn and absent] …Virginia who did not at some period of the war scale the heights of Chimborazo and receive the hospital-ities of friends residing there, and consequently nearly every one is familiar with that famous hospital. On the airy summit of a lofty hill – to which an imaginative Confederate gave the name of Chimborazo – stands an extensive range of long one story wooden buildings, divided into divisions and wards, which were erected by the Confederate Government during the war for the benefit of the wounded and invalid soldiers of the Virginia forces.

The location is, in summer, a delightful one. Perched on an elevated plateau, far above the river, which with many a whirl and eddy winds along its base, its heights are ever fanned by the refressing [sic] breezes and the eye commands a magnificent prospect of field and woodland and shining river stretching miles away until all are at last blended in the blue haze of the dim distance.

At this spot thousands of the gallant boys in grey were gathered for medical attendance. Here, after a great battle, the ghastly tide of war swept its wrecks of heroes, and long trains of ambulances, filled with mangled forms, deposited their gory burdens. Ah, if those walls could but speak, what stories could they not recite of manly suffering heroically borne, of woman’s tenderness and love, whose passionate prayers and pleadings fell too often vainly on the dull, cold ear of death, of agonizing partings that were, alas, forever.

Those walls have echoed with the groans wrung by the agony of the surgeon’s quivering steel from many a manly bosom, have resounded with the ravings of delirium, and reverberated with hollow murmur the last faint whispered accents of “God,” “home” or “mother,” and the sobs of broken hearted women weeping over the dead, cold forms of their lost and loved ones.

But all this is of the past. The tide of war has ebbed away. The Federal blue has taken the place of the Confederate grey; where gallant soldiers once reclined on painful couches, lazy negroes now snore in their blankets, after a night’s debauch; and where Southern women moved like beautiful ministering angels of love and tenderness around the bedsides of the sick and the dying, school-marms, with nasal intonations, discourse the mysteries of a b ab for the edification of negro picaninnies.

But the farce which has followed the tragedy is about to close, and the curtain is being rung down by a series of government auctions, and under the stroke of the auctioneer’s hammer the buildings are vanishing rapidly. Many have been already torn down and others are following. Some are, however, purchased by negroes for residences; but we sincerely hope the owner of the land will not allow this beautiful spot to be occupied by a crowd of thrifty idlers, who will breed cholera as surely as they are allowed to remain.

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