ALMOST HOME opens in a flooded Confederate prison at the confluence of the Alabama and Cahaba rivers, in the hollowed-out heart of Dixie. A one-time cotton warehouse refitted to shelter fewer than 900 men, Cahaba Prison held nearly four times that many by war’s end. One prisoner calculated that each man had six square feet of his own, two feet by three feet. Disease was rampant.
It was from here in April 1865 that the Muncie Men set out under guard for Vicksburg on the Mississippi and, finally, passage home.