Something I didn’t know until I visited Oak Woods Cemetery on Saturday: Confederate Mound, which is within the bounds of the cemetery but on land owned by the federal government, is thought to be the largest mass grave in the Western Hemisphere. Not only that, the memorial at the site is the largest one in the North dedicated to Confederate soldiers.

“Near the southwest corner of Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood [sic] stands a monument dedicated to the thousands of Confederate soldiers who died as prisoners of war at Camp Douglas,” notes the National Park Service. “The monument marks a mass grave containing the remains of more than 4,000 Confederate prisoners, reinterred here from the grounds of the prison camp and the old Chicago City Cemetery.

“Confederate Mound is an elliptical plot, approximately 475 feet by 275 feet, located between Divisions 1 and 2 of Section K.  The most prominent feature of the plot is the Confederate Monument, a 30-foot granite column topped with a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier, a figure based on the painting ‘Appomattox’ by John A. Elder.” (The sculptor doesn’t seem to be known.)

As for Camp Douglas, it “opened in 1861 as a training site for newly recruited soldiers from this area, and part of it would remain so,” says the Chicago Tribune. “It was named for the man who donated its 60 acres of land: Stephen A. Douglas, the politician known as the ‘Little Giant,’ most famous for his 1858 debates for the U.S. Senate with Abraham Lincoln (Douglas won re-election).

“It became a prisoner-of-war camp in early 1862, as 5,000 Confederate soldiers moved in after being captured when Fort Donelson in Tennessee fell to Union troops led by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.”

From there, things at the camp went from bad to very, very bad in short order, as usual for 19th-century POW camps. The result was a mass grave in a corner of Chicago probably unknown to most 21st-century Chicagoans.

At least the Confederate dead are memorialized in a highly visible way, a result of sectional reconciliation late in the 19th century. “General John C. Underwood, a regional head of the United Confederate Veterans, designed the monument and was at its dedication on May 30, 1895, along with President Grover Cleveland and an estimated 100,000 on-lookers,” the NPS says.

“In 1911, the Commission for Marking the Graves of Confederate Dead paid to have the monument lifted up and set upon a base of red granite; affixed to the four sides of the base were bronze plaques inscribed with the names of Confederate soldiers known to be buried in the mass grave.”

Near the Confederate memorial are the graves of 12 guards at the prison who probably were carried off by the same diseases that beleaguered their prisoners. Their stones are all marked Unknown.

There are also four well-preserved cannons at the site as well.
Elsewhere at Oak Woods Cemetery are a smaller number of Union graves — as far as possible from Confederate Mound, our guide pointed out (sectional reconciliation only went so far).
If I remember correctly, they were residents of a Chicago old soldier’s home, and so their burials were a good bit later than the Confederates’ (as at the Texas State Cemetery). A weather-worn soldier watches over them.
So does Lincoln, in an unusual posture for depictions of the 16th president.
Post 91 of the Department of Illinois GAR put up the statue, which is a copy of a statue erected in 1903 near Pana, Ill. The sculptor was Charles Mulligan, who also did “Lincoln, The Railsplitter” in Garfield Park.

One more stone at Oak Woods, though it has nothing to do with the Civil War. It’s a memorial to railroad engineer Cale Cramer.
Sacred to the memory of
CALE CRAMER
who lost his life by saving
the train at York, Indiana
July 27 1887.
Aged 37 years, 1 month
and 11 days.

It was a story I’d never heard before. Graveyards.com tells us that “Cale Cramer’s monument resembles a pile of disassembled locomotive parts. Cramer was an engineer for New York Central. On July 27, 1887, Cramer stayed at his post as another train approached. Attempting to prevent a head-on collision, he activated the brakes and shut off the steam. Cramer was killed in the crash, but had reduced speed enough that his passengers escaped without injury. The passengers raised funds to provide this monument.”

Large thunderstorm during the mid-afternoon today following a clear morning. That wasn’t so odd, but when I checked the radar maps it looked like only the northwestern suburbs were getting any rain at all. The storm also decided to linger here, and pour and pour, rather than race to the southeast as usual.

Oak Woods Cemetery occupies about 183 acres on the South Side of Chicago, only a short distance southwest of Jackson Park and about a mile west of Lake Michigan. On Saturday morning, I got up earlier than usual, drove down to Oak Woods and joined a Chicago Architecture Foundation tour of the cemetery. No one else in my house was interested, so I went by myself.

Skies were overcast, but at least the rains had stopped. Oak Woods, founded in 1853 south of the city — I believe it wasn’t in the city proper until the great annexation of 1889 — was part of the 19th-century vogue for park-like cemeteries. Which it remains to this day, green and leafy in late summer.

To design the place, the founders of the cemetery tapped one Adolph Strauch, a Prussian landscape architect who did parks and park-like cemeteries in the United States (Ve vill haf Ordnung, he was known to mutter). He was especially active in Cincinnati, but in Chicago, Strauch also did the highly picturesque Graceland Cemetery, the North Side equivalent of Oak Woods.

There are also a number of water features that add to the overall aesthetic.
The tour was partly concerned with the burial sites of well-known people. Oak Woods has quite a few, such as a number of Chicago mayors. Here’s Big Bill Thompson’s obelisk, for instance.
Here’s Harold Washington.

Other notable markers we saw included baseball player Cap Anson; Bishop Louis Henry Ford, head of the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ; John H. Johnson, founder of Ebony and Jet magazines; Rep. James R. Mann, who lent his name to the Mann Act; Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe, star of the Negro League; and activist Ida B. Wells.

Along with Jesse Owens.
As well as Illinois politico Roland Burris. Former Sen. Burris, it should be noted, is still alive. He’s planning ahead with a sizable tomb detailing some of his career in stone, in a way that earned him a fair amount of ridicule. It did seem like a pompous exercise. Perhaps he doesn’t understand that Death doesn’t care about your CV.

Interesting stones I didn’t get to see included Enrico Fermi, Nancy Green, Chicago Mayor Monroe Heath, and pre-Capone Outfit boss Big Jim Colosimo, who was rubbed out in 1920. Or the monument and flag for the 16 firefighters and workers who died fighting the blaze at the Cold Storage Building at the World’s Fair on July 10, 1893.

Off in a corner of the property is a small, separate Jewish cemetery, fenced off probably to discourage vandals from disturbing the stones.
Reminded me a bit of the old Jewish cemetery in Krakow, though that’s had a few more centuries to age.