Having spent over thirty years collecting information on the prison and its garrison at Point Lookout and close to ten to write this book, author Robert E. Crickenberger, Jr. goes above and beyond including interviews with local citizens and historians pertinent to Point Lookout and its history. It also contains site visits to several of the key locations that affected the lives of the inhabitants of Point Lookout before, during, and immediately after the war and numerous unpublished primary sources, diaries, letters, and recollections of Confederate prisoners and Union guards. The manuscript is currently under contract and to be published by Savas Beatie Publishing shortly.

Robert E. Crickenberger's new book on Point Lookout Prison; “If It Were Not For Hope, How Could We Live In A Place Like This?’’ takes a fresh and scholarly look at this Federal Civil War Prison Camp in Scotland, Maryland. Point Lookout Prison Camp was a massive Civil War prison (1863-1865) located in southern Maryland situated on a peninsula bordered by the Potomac River on the west and the Chesapeake Bay on its eastern shore. It was constructed in the wake of the Battle of Gettysburg incarcerating many of the recently captured Confederate prisoners. Officially called Camp Hoffmann, it would eventually grow to become a 45- acre prison compound surrounded by a12-foot-tall wooden fence that provided a catwalk from which guards could monitor the activities of the prison population within the confines of the prison stockade. The prison depot included mess halls/cookhouses, sutler store, and hospital. This new thought provoking book will offer detailed and recently discovered research that will assist scholars and casual readers alike in understanding the significance that Point Lookout had upon both the war and the prisoner-of-war system that would be passed on to future 19th-century American wars.