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    The Photographic History of the Civil War
                  Volume 7 -
Prisons and Hospitals

  Confederate Prisoners from the West at Camp Douglas near Chicago

 

Camp Douglas, Near Chicago,

Where Confederate Prisoners from the West Were Confined

In the foreground stands a Confederate sergeant with rolls of the prisoners in his bands. It was the custom of the captives to choose a mess-sergeant from among their own number. These hundreds of men are a part of the thousands confined at Camp Douglas. The barracks were enclosed by a fence to confine the Confederate prisoners taken at Forts Donelson and Henry, and new barracks were afterward built. The barracks were wooden buildings ninety by twenty-four feet, of which twenty feet was cut off for the kitchen. In the remaining seventy feet an average of one hundred and seventy men slept in tiers of bunks. Camp Douglas was located on land belonging to the Stephen A. Douglas estate, and was bounded by Cottage Grove Avenue on the east. Forest Avenue on the west, Thirty-first Street on the north, and Thirty-third Street on the south. In 1911 the Cottage Grove Avenue electric cars were running past the old front, and the Thirty-first Street cross-town cars past the north boundary; the "Camp" was a residence district.

page 22 & 23  in 1911 book

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This online edition of The Photographic History of the Civil War includes improved images using digital images from the Library of Congress, when available. It also includes additional images that are either cropped from the Library of Congress digital images or are related to the specific topic being discussed in the article or page.

Volume 7 of the History is the first volume I'm publishing online simply because it was the one I was interested in when I decided to publish.

More to come, I hope.

 

Copyright © 2004 Michael P. Goad  All rights reserved.