From the Springfield 2016 Visitors Guide.
CAMP BUTLER NATIONAL CEMETERY
Camp Butler was once the site of a Union Army training camp for regiments raised in Illinois. It later became a Confederate prison. Now, it is a national cemetery for veterans and their descendants.
It was named for Illinois treasurer at the time, William Butler, not Benjamin Butler as I had thought at one time. William T. Sherman helped pick the site. It was the second-largest training camp in Illinois, after Chicago's Camp Douglas. By the end of the war, some 200,000 Union troops had passed through it.
More than 25,000 individuals are buried here, including over 1,700 Union and Confederate soldiers. As many as 700 prisoners died there during 1862 as an epidemic of smallpox and other diseases ran rampant. There are 866 Confederate graves with a marker placed in their midst in the early 2000s by the Illinois Division Sons of Confederate Veterans.
5063 Camp Butler Road
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