Historical Burial Place. It didn't start out where it sits today. Camp Douglas was the original site of the burials, it was located on land owned by politician Stephen A. Douglas. Abraham Lincoln’s opponent in the 1860 presidential election originally served as a Union recruitment and training center, it soon turned into a prisoner of war camp, Camp Douglas was called "eighty acres of hell" because of the disease and cruelty manifest there. The camp established two small cemeteries on its grounds, but most of the casualties were buried in Chicago’s old City Cemetery along the shores of Lake Michigan, in what is now Lincoln Park. In 1866, Chicago closed the old City Cemetery due to its flooding and that forced the Federal Government to find a permanent burial ground for the remains of the Confederate prisoners. A burial plot was selected and landscape architect Adolph Strauch designed the cemetery, wanting a park-like setting, rather than a garden. At that time approximately 4,200 remains were reinterred between 1865 to 1867. By the 1890s, ex-Confederates within Chicago and in Georgia raised the funds to design and build the monument, which was dedicated in 1895. The most prominent feature of the plot is the Confederate Monument, a 30-foot granite column topped with a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier, a figure based on the painting “Appomattox” by John A. Elder. At the base of the tapered square shaft are three images: “The Call to Arms” showing a group rallying for the cause, “A Soldier’s Death Dream” depicting a fallen soldier and his horse on the battlefield, and “A Veteran’s Return Home” showing a soldier arriving at a ruined cabin. It is dedicated to the thousands of Confederate soldiers who died as prisoners of war at Camp Douglas. The monument marks a mass grave for the Confederate prisoners. In 1911, the Commission for Marking the Graves of Confederate Dead paid to have the monument lifted up and set upon a base of red granite; affixed to the four sides of the base were bronze plaques inscribed with the names of Confederate soldiers known to be buried in the mass grave. In 2010 The Confederate Mound was cleaned and re-mortared. Signage and plaques were cleaned of corrosion and restored as well.