GETTING REFURBISHED
The 6,000 Confederate dead buried at Oak Woods Cemetery were victims at Chicago's notorious Camp Douglas, on the grounds of former Illinois senator Stephen Douglas' estate. He also ran for president.
Earlier in the war, it was used as a training base for Illinois troops, then as a prison for captured Confederates. Conditions were so bad that the prison got the name "Eighty Acres of Hell because of rampant disease and cruelty.
After the war, the federal government bought two acres in the cemetery for burial of the Confederate dead. By the 1890s, ex-Confederate soldiers in Chicago and in Georgia raised funds for the monument and it was dedicated in 1895.
It sat there for the next 115 years with nothing being done to it. The new Abraham Lincoln national Cemetery near Joliet, Illinois, has stewardship over the Confederate Mound which is federally-owned. Work begins this month and is expected to be finished by January.
Good News for the Confederate Dead and Their Relatives. --B-R'er
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