Camp Douglas in Chicago

 

Camp Douglas, in Chicago, Illinois, was a Union Army POW camp for Confederate States of America soldiers taken prisoner during the War Between the States.

The Union Army first used the camp in 1861 as an organizational and training camp for volunteer regiments. It became a prisoner-of-war camp in early 1862. Later in 1862 the Union Army again used Camp Douglas as a training camp. In the fall of 1862, the Union Army used the facility as a detention camp for paroled Union Army prisoners pending their formal exchange for Confederate prisoners. Camp Douglas became a permanent prisoner-of-war camp from January 1863 to the end of the war in May 1865. In the summer and fall of 1865, the camp served as a mustering out point for Union Army volunteer regiments. The camp was dismantled and the movable property was sold off late in the year. About 26,060 Confederate soldiers passed through the Camp Douglas prison camp. The camp eventually came to be described as the Andersonville of the North for its wretched conditions and death rate of between seventeen and twenty-three per cent.

Posted by Bob Wallace, who says, there's nothing left of this place in Chicago, no one has never heard of it, but as for Andersonville in the South....well, they lost the war.