Chicago's forgotten Civil War prison camp
By: Meribah Knight
March 11, 2015
When Chris Rowland’s co-worker told him that Chicago was once home to a Civil War prison camp, he almost didn’t believe it. But a bit of Googling led Chris to a name, Camp Douglas, and a location, Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. It also led him to the camp’s gloomy history, one that included dismal living conditions and a death toll that numbered in the thousands. Beyond that, though, Chris, a 36-year-old sales engineer at a South Side manufacturing company, found hardly any information about the camp. So he came to Curious City for help:
Why was there a prison camp in Chicago during the Civil War and why did so many people die there? What happened to it?
Camp Douglas was one of the largest POW camps for the Union Army, located in the heart of Bronzeville. More than 40,000 troops passed through the camp during its nearly four years in operation. What’s more — and this is where it gets gloomier — it’s been hyperbolically remembered by some historians as the “deadliest prison in American history†and “eighty acres of hell.†So the fact that Chris, despite his earnest attempt, didn’t find much on Camp Douglas interested Curious City, too. How could one of the deadliest Civil War prison camps virtually disappear from our collective memory? Answering this part of Chris’s question had us consider how a city acknowledges the darker parts of its past and the benefits, if any, of remembering them at all.
https://www.wbez.org/shows/curious-city/chicagos-forgotten-civil-war-prison-camp/2aea8281-878c-436f-8311-62747b7be31f
