In 2019 I was moving my step-son up to college at SUNY Binghamton. I decided to drive 60 miles west to Elmira to see what remains of the Union prison camp and the National Cemetery there. I wanted to begin with the recognition of the severe toll that this and other prison camps took on the inmates. Almost 3,000 of the 12,000 men imprisoned there died. The camp was only open open for a little over a year.
Below is the monument to the Confederate prisoners who died in Elmira prison at Woodlawn Cemetery.
I visited the site of the Shohola disaster a decade ago, so I wanted to see the monument in Elmira to these victims of train train crash. A train carrying prisoners to Elmira crashed into another train, killing scores. The men had been buried next to the train tracks originally. Their bodies are now in a mass grave beside this monument.
One side of the monument recalls the Union dead, the other side remembers the Confederates.
At the cemetery, there is a memorial to John Jones, the sexton of the cemetery who buried each of the Confederates interred here. As the marker says, Jones was an escaped slave. It is rare that the people who buried the dead the are remembered. Kudos to Elmira for remembering him in the cemetery and across the street at the Jones home.
More on John Jones, the Sexton from historian Michael Gray:
John W. Jones, held in bondage by the Elzy family in Leesburg, had escaped along the Underground Railroad in 1844. Jones had resettled in Elmira, gained an education at a local school, and advanced to the position of sexton at Woodlawn Cemetery by the time the prison opened in July 1864. At the end of that month, Commissary General Hoffman approved three hundred dollars for leasing a half acre of ground at the local cemetery to bury dead Confederates, and authorized employment of a person to bury them for forty dollars a month. Jones held his modest job at a fortuitous time, for he soon found that the morbid business of death boomed while the prison existed. To help the sexton transfer corpses, Hoffman allowed a wagon to be purchased and modified into a hearse.40 “The first day that I was called in my capacity of sexton to bury a prisoner who had died,” wrote Jones, “I thought nothing of it.… Directly there were more dead. One day I had seven to bury. After that they began to die very fast.”41 By 1865, Southern interments were becoming more expensive and expansive as the cemetery began running out of room. On January 1, 1865, Mayor Arnot leased out an additional half-acre of land at Woodlawn, which cost the government $600. Also, undoubtedly to the chagrin of Hoffman, Jones was not paid a monthly fee of $40 but was instead compensated at an individual rate set at $2.50 per burial.
In the meantime, a customized hearse driven by John Donohoe for $60 per month had been pulling up to the morgue for its daily collection. Inmates employed at the prison camp morgue, a sixteen-by-thirty-by-twelve-foot building, prepared their own for burial, constructing pine coffins as fast as they could while corpses piled up in the corners. Clothing and personal items of the deceased were to be left alone, and each cadaver was tagged for identification, which included name, company, regiment, and date of death. These records were transcribed onto the coffin lid, then the papers were bottled and put in the box before it was nailed shut. The straight-shaped coffins were loaded six at a time onto the hearse for removal to Woodlawn, a few miles north of the pen. This “admirable system” provoked one Confederate to state sarcastically that at Elmira “the care of the dead was better than that bestowed on the living.”
At Woodlawn, Sexton Jones directed the opening of trenches… Caskets were placed in short increments, and a crew of ten to twelve prisoners on graveyard detail helped with the digging. The largest number that Jones buried in a single day was forty-three, which brought more than $100 to him, while his busiest month, March, brought him $1,237.50.46 This is not to suggest that the sexton did not earn his pay. He meticulously transferred the information on each coffin lid into a large ledger that detailed the position of every Confederate buried at Woodlawn. He made sure that the wooden headboards had the correct information written on them in white lead paint, and then placed them over the appropriate plot. Nine laborers were on the quartermaster’s payroll, each paid forty-five dollars per month to set headboards that local carpenter William F. Naefe had built.
Gray’s book, The Business of Captivity: Elmira and Its Civil War Prison is the leading scholarly work on the prison. According to Gray:
Eventually, workers dug more than thirty-six trenches and laid to rest 2,973 Confederates at Woodlawn Cemetery.48 Incidentally, it would have cost Prison Commissary Hoffman only $480 if the Sexton had been paid monthly. Instead, Hoffman paid him a total of $7,432.50 for prisoner burials. The old slave had adapted quite well to the capitalistic North. Long after the end of hostilities, a personal friend of Jones remembered the significance of the Confederate burials at $2.50 apiece: “The aggregate of these fees was the basis of the comfortable fortune he amassed in the years after the war. He was rated as the wealthiest colored man in this part of the State.” [Gray, Michael. The Business of Captivity: Elmira and Its Civil War Prison . The Kent State University Press. Kindle Edition.]
There is a nice interpretive panel at the entrance to the cemetery. One of the aspects it explains is the Shohola monument and the disaster that led to its erection.
The panel also explains the start of the National Cemetery at Elmira and alludes to the politics of marking the Confederate graves with stones.
Now I am going to turn to the long neglected site of the prison camp itself. When I first visited as a boy with my dad fifty years ago, we could find nothing telling us about the site other than one of those pretty blue and yellow New York State history signs. While much of the site remains uninterpreted, a local group is working very hard to create better awareness of the tragic importance of the old grounds of the prison. If you go, you should begin by going to the old water pumping station where the only known building that was part of the prison was reassembled a few years ago. There is some debate about what the building was used for. There is also a reconstruction of one of the “wards” or barracks at the prison. This was a typical building used to house 100 men. Honestly, it looks just like the photos of these buildings taken in 1865 that I have seen.
Here I am in front of the original building from the prison:
These buildings were all torn down after the war and sold as scrap by the Federal government. This one was found in storage and has been lovingly reassembled. You can see by the hours that is only open until Labor Day and on Saturday. I arrived 30 minutes after it closed for visits!
You can visit the Friends of the Elmira Civil War Prison Camp here. You may want to join one of their weekend tours over the summer.
The next building is the reconstruction of the prisoner housing.
The restoration group has set up some interpretive posters inside the old pump house,. The exterior of the pump house has been restored nicely, but the interior still has a way to go. This is a post-war building.
If you look closely, the shades on the window contain photographs of the cemetery.
Next to the reconstructed and restored buildings are a monument, three flagpoles, and an interpretive panel.
Here is the monument. Like the other materials at the site, it commemorates the prisoners, the guards, and those Union soldiers who passed through the Elmira recruit depot in 1861 and 1862 on their way to the seat of war.
There is a large interpretive panel which describes the Depot, the Prison Camp, a prison escape, and John Jones.
Anyone travelling in New York State is familiar with these state historic signs. This one is near the northestern edge of the camp, along Water Street.
One of the landmarks associated with the prison that still stands is the Foster House at 722 W. Water St. This house, because of its size and because it was on a hill directly across from the entrance gate of the camp, is on both prisoner-drawn maps and drawings. It was visible to the men on the inside.
Much of the camp is now a suburban neighborhood.
The Southern end of the prison ground is in an undeveloped state. As with many sites on the banks of rivers, the shoreline has changed over the years. This is the area, where the small-pox hospital and other facilities were located are on a downhill portion which runs past Foster Pond and down to the river. When the site was used as a training camp in the summer of 1861, Foster Pond was considered a beneficial place. It was used for bathing by soldiers cooling off during the hot summer days. When the camp reopened in July, 1864 it had some of these features, but over the months it became a collecting grounds for the human wastes of the prisoners. The place stank and became a source of disease. Here is a description of the geography of this portion of the camp:
The lower half of the camp dropped 20 feet toward the pond and river, where weeds grew in loose, sandy soil. Foster’s Pond, 12 yards wide and 580 yards in length, dominated this portion of the prison. The pond came within twenty feet of the western wall, and on its opposite side a bridge crossed over the water, while the pond narrowed underneath the eastern fence and connected to the river. [Gray, Michael. The Business of Captivity: Elmira and Its Civil War Prison . The Kent State University Press. Kindle Edition.]
Below is the southern part of the camp looking south towards the Chemung River. The little stream running through the center of the photo was on the west side of the camp. If you are visiting, this is near Gould St., 2 blocks south of Water St.
I was visiting with three Brooklynites who were happy to see deer grazing nearby.
As I arrived after closing time, a friend (lupaglupa) supplied pictures from inside the camp site. Below, a view of the bunks inside the barracks reproduction.
Here is a model of the barracks.
If you go, you should begin by going to the old water pumping station where the only known building that was part of the prison was reassembled a couple of years ago. There is some debate about what the building was used for. There is also a reconstruction of one of the “wards” or barracks at the prison. This was a typical building used to house 100 men. These buildings were all torn down after the war and sold as scrap by the Federal government. This one was found in storage and has been lovingly reassembled.
The small building attributed to Barracks #3 was disassembled in the mid 1980’s by a group of volunteers & placed in what was originally thought to be temporary storage until land could be acquired for reconstruction. That temp storage lasted 30 years until the Friends acquired the lot from the City of Elmira. It’s function is unknown at this time. None of the extant photos or documents illustrate a building with that footprint. Based on its structure, it is most likely a utility building.
The barracks building represents the style originally constructed in 1861 to house a company of Union soldiers up until just days before it was converted for prison use and the first CS POWs arrived in Jul 1864. It is based on photos and written descriptions. There is an extant photo of Co B 64th NY Vol Inf (mustered in 1861) on parade in front of barracks of this style. There were 30 of these structures in existence at the time of the opening of the POW stockade. In fact, the 2 story guardhouse visible in some of the photos still housed Union deserters until a new one could be built across town at Barracks #1.
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