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Elmira Prison Camp OnLine Library |
[The following document comes
from the Confederate Veteran, a magazine published throughout the South from
the 1890s until the 1940s. It comes from Volume XXII, which contains writings
from the year 1914, page 396.]
By Ms. Sussie Gentry
How
many Southern people know that in the State of New York there are buried
2,917 Confederate soldiers in a cemetery of two and one-half acres that
should be enclosed with a fence and memorial gate?
In
1864 the United States government located at Elmira N.Y., a prison camp for
Confederate soldiers, and until the close of the war it was retained as such,
many of the prisoners being transferred from Point Lookout, Md.
The
mortality at the Elmira prison camp was very great on account of climatic
conditions. The prisoners were in a low physical condition from fighting and
poor and insufficient nourishment. They died rapidly and were buried in a
part of the city's large cemetery and, strange to say, by an ex-slave, John
W. Jones, who had escaped from the Elzey family, of Leesburg, Va., by the
"underground railroad" in 1850. In some way this Negro became
interested in the Confederate prisoners and buried the first who died, then
the next, and the next, until he was employed to bury them all; and, at the
government's expense, he had nicely painted headboards put up, on which were
the name, company, regiment, and State.
In
1877 the government purchased the two-and-a-half acre plot, in which there
were thirty-six rows of graves, at a cost of $1,500. Headstones replaced the
wooden boards, and the name of "Woodlawn Cemetery" was given to
this place. For forty-eight years the good people of Elmira have yearly
decorated the graves of the Confederate dead as they have their own, but the
cemetery needs a fence and memorial gate to make it entirely complete. A list
of the dead has been kept, alphabetically arranged as to names, but
irrespective of States.
The
following is the result of my research and labor:
