Oak Woods Cemetery

Story

Oak Woods Cemetery is a cemetery in Chicago, Illinois. Located at 1035 E. 67th Street, in the Greater Grand Crossing area of Chicago's South Side, it was established on February 12, 1853, and covers.It is the setting for a mass grave and memorial for Confederate prisoners of war. Oak Woods is also the final resting place of several famous Americans including Harold Washington, Ida B Wells and Enrico Fermi.HistoryThe first burials took place in 1860. After the Civil War (1861–1865), several thousand Confederate soldiers, prisoners who died at Camp Douglas, were reburied here. A monument and marker, which former Kentucky Lieutenant Governor John C. Underwood helped construct, probably inflates the number of soldiers buried as 6,000, but lists the names of more than 4,000. Another, smaller memorial commemorates the Union soldiers who died at the Camp Douglas, often from contagious diseases. These bodies had originally been buried at City Cemetery, which was closed and removed during expansion of Lincoln Park during the urban renewal following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. They were exhumed and reinterred together in a mass grave, which came to be known as Confederate Mound, reputedly the largest mass grave in the Western Hemisphere.