Camp Chase Cemetery: some of the
thousands of Confederate graves.
Camp Chase was a military
staging, training and prison
camp in Columbus,
Ohio
, during the American
Civil War. All that remains of the camp today is a
Confederate cemetery
containing 2,260 graves. The cemetery is located in what is now the
Hilltop neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio.
History
Camp Chase was a Civil War camp established in May 1861, on land
leased by the U.S. Government. It served as a replacement for the
much smaller Camp Jackson. Four miles west of Columbus, the main
entrance was on the
National Road.
Boundaries of the camp were present-day Broad Street (north), Hague
Avenue (east), Sullivant Avenue (south), and near Westgate Avenue
(west). Named for former Ohio Governor and
Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, it was a training camp for Ohio
volunteer army soldiers, a parole camp, a muster-out post, and a
prisoner-of-war camp. The nearby
Camp
Thomas served as a similar base for the
Regular Army.
Camp Chase Cemetery Monument.
As many as 150,000 Union soldiers and 25,000 Confederate prisoners
passed through its gates from 1861–65. By February 1865, over 9,400
men were held at the prison. More than 2,000 Confederates are
buried in the Camp Chase Cemetery (located at 2900 Sullivant
Avenue, Columbus, and is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily).
Four future
Presidents passed through
Camp Chase—
Andrew Johnson,
Rutherford B. Hayes,
James
Garfield, and
William McKinley.
It also held Confederates captured during
Morgan's Raid in 1863, including Col.
Basil W. Duke.
Early in
the war, the prison section held a group of prominent western Virginia
and Kentucky
civilians
suspected of actively supporting secession, including former 3-term United States Congressman Richard Henry Stanton.
The camp
was closed in 1865, and by September 1867, dismantled buildings,
usable items, and 450 patients from Tripler Military Hospital (also
in Columbus) were transferred to the National Soldier's Home in
Dayton
. In
1895, former Union soldier William H. Knauss organized the first
memorial service at the cemetery, and in 1906 he wrote a history of
the camp. The Memorial Arch was dedicated in 1902. From 1912 to
1994, the
United
Daughters of the Confederacy held annual services. The Hilltop
Historical Society now sponsors the event on the second Sunday in
June.
The Camp Chase Confederate Cemetery has the dubious honor of a Lady
in Gray, a name often given to a female spirit dressed entirely in
gray or one pale or gray in appearance. In Camp Chase, this woman
is struggling to find her lost husband.
The Lady in Gray
The Lady in Gray is purportedly an apparition that haunts Camp
Chase Cemetery. The story goes that the ghost is looking for her
lost love, and cannot find him in the cemetery. The woman is
described as young, in her late teens or early twenties, dressed
entirely in gray, and carrying a clean white handkerchief. The
legend of the Lady in Gray dates back to just after the Civil War,
when visitors to Camp Chase spotted the woman walking through the
cemetery, trying to read the carved names on the mock grave
markers. She was seen quite often for several years, before
disappearing completely.
Camp Chase today
Aside from the Confederate Cemetery, which still exists, the land
that formerly housed Camp Chase is now a residential and commercial
area known as
Westgate, a
community in the Hilltop section of west Columbus. This development
was built in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and is now a stable,
if aging, Columbus community.
References
- Historical Marker #27-25, located at 2900 Sullivant Avenue,
Columbus, Ohio, installed by the Ohio Bicentennial Commission,
1999.
See also
External links
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