Chicago's Camp Douglas, 1861‑1865
Joseph L. Eisendrath, Jr.
Chicago manufacturer Joseph L. Eisendrath, Jr. is a man of many interests. He is editor of the Airpost Journal (monthly publication of the American Air Mail Society) and has won honors for his work with the Boy Scouts of America. Among the articles he has written for various historical publications was one titled "Illinois' Oldest Memorial — the Stephen A. Douglas Monument" in the Summer, 1958 issue of this Journal. He is a past president of the Chicago Civil War Round Table.
If you were to ask each of Chicago's busy motorists hurrying along the Outer Drive on the South Side what the monument just west of the Illinois Central Railroad at Thirty-fourth Street is supposed to represent, probably not one in a hundred could tell you that it was erected over the tomb of Stephen A. Douglas. Even fewer would know that the land around it was once Camp Douglas, mobilization center for volunteer soldiers during the Civil War and a prison camp for thousands of captured Confederates.
In April, 1861, shortly after the fall of Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln issued his first call for volunteers. The regular army was not large, and it was decided that the individual states should be given quotas and asked to raise military units, which, after proper training, would be turned over to the federal government for muster into service as volunteer forces.
Governor Richard Yates, in filling the Illinois quota, p38divided the state into military districts, with mobilization centers for each. The Northern Illinois Military District, composed of the twenty-four most northern counties in the state, was canvassed by the Illinois Adjutant General, A. C. Fuller, for a suitable mobilization center, and in September he determined on a site along Lake Michigan east of the United States Fairgrounds, •about four miles from the Chicago courthouse. Stephen A. Douglas, late senator for Illinois, who had died early in June, had owned •160 acres of land at this point, •forty-two acres of which — in open prairie — was made available by the Douglas estate. The land lay west of Cottage Grove Avenue, then the road to the village of Hyde Park, and just north of the grounds of the recently established Chicago University (not to be confused with the present University of Chicago, which came into existence some thirty years later). Part of the Douglas farm was reserved by the estate, primarily because the Senator had been buried there but partly because all the land was not needed for the camp site. At that time, the Illinois Central Railroad ran along the shore of the lake, on a wooden trestle, and farm land came down to the water's edge.
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