ELMIRA, N.Y. – It sounds like a Believe-It-or-Not scenario: Confederate soldiers who died as prisoners of war buried in a Yankee graveyard by a runaway slave.

But it’s true. And it happened in Elmira, New York.

On this Memorial Day, 154 years after the end of the Civil War, graves of Confederate soldiers are still well-kept at Elmira’s Woodlawn National Cemetery. And descendants of those soldiers who died in Elmira can find their graves thanks to John W. Jones, a former slave who escaped from Virginia to Elmira via the Underground Railroad.

Jones buried or supervised the burial of each Confederate soldier that died in Elmira’s prison of war camp. Marty Chalk, president and board chairman of the Friends of Elmira Civil War Prison Camp, called him an extraordinary man.

“He took time to ensure that each soldier received a proper burial, and also took time to ensure that the information was correctly documented,” Chalk said. “As a former slave, he certainly could have been apathetic toward his duties.”

One of the stories regarding Jones involves parents who came from the South to Elmira looking for their son, said Bruce Whitmarsh, director of the Chemung County Historical Society.

“They were directed to John Jones,” Whitmarsh said. “He walked them right to (the grave) and said ‘Your son is buried right here,’ because he had done such a careful job.”

Jones buried or supervised the burial of almost 3,000 Confederate soldiers that died in the prison camp. The coffins had their name, rank, regiment and date of death inscribed on the lid. That information was also written on a piece of paper, put into in a sealed jar and placed inside the coffin with the body.

Jones received $2.50 from the federal government for each Confederate soldier buried. Based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that would be equivalent to $76.97 today. This money eventually enabled him to buy his farm on Elmira’s College Avenue and to be rated as the wealthiest black man in this part of the state.

Camp history

At the beginning of the War Between the States, Camp Rathbun in Elmira had been a Union military recruiting depot where soldiers attended basic training. It was later chosen as a draft rendezvous, and then it was turned into a prisoner of war camp.

“Elmira trained soldiers from 1861 to the end of the war. It did not become a prisoner of war camp until the middle of 1864 because the training was starting to wind down,” said Whitmarsh, who is also a board member of the John W. Jones Museum and the Friends of the Elmira Civil War Prison Camp.

“It sort of became surplus property, and the military was looking for a place to put the prisoners they had at Point Lookout, Maryland, which was getting overcrowded,” he said. “The military looked at it and saw this great rail connection and open space as a reason to choose it as a prisoner of war camp.”

The prisoner of war population boomed on both sides after a prisoner exchange program between the Union and the Confederacy fell apart, according to the National Park Service.

When the Emancipation Proclamation became official and the Union began recruiting black soldiers, all prisoners were expected to be treated equally, regardless of color. But under a resolution by the Confederate Congress, black soldiers taken prisoner would not be exchanged and would likely be killed or sold into slavery.

ABOUT THE CEMETERY

Woodlawn National Cemetery is located inside Woodlawn Cemetery at 1825 Davis St., Elmira, New York.

Along with almost 3,000 Confederate soliders, the cemetery continues to accept military burials.

Among those buried at the city-of-Elmira-owned Woodlawn Cemetery is American humorist Samuel Langhorne Clemens, also known as Mark Twain. He wrote many of his works during the summers at Quarry Farm in Elmira, the hometown of his wife, Olivia Langdon.

John W. Jones, the former slave who recorded burial information of nearly Confederate soldiers, is buried not far from Clemens.

The Elmira prison camp was located on a roughly 20-acre site next to the Chemung River and also incorporated a small body of water known as Foster’s Pond, which prisoners used as a latrine.

A total of about 12,000 Confederates were incarcerated in Elmira during the time that the prison operated from July 6, 1864, until July 11, 1865. However, there was only enough wooden barrack space for about 5,000 prisoners.

Whitmarsh said as many as 7,000 to 8,000 prisoners may have been housed there at a time.

Deterioriating conditions

Many prisoners were forced to live in tents along the river, even during freezing winter weather. Not surprisingly, they dubbed the camp “Hellmira.”

An observation platform with chairs and binoculars was built outside the prison camp. Visitors were each charged 10 cents to stare at the prisoners. Refreshments were sold to spectators while the Confederate soldiers starved.

In addition to insufficient food for the prisoners, typhoid, smallpox, pneumonia, dysentery, inadequate medical care and river flooding ultimately resulted in the deaths of 2,963 Confederates. That’s a mortality rate of about 25 percent, the highest among Union prison camps.

“But when you look at the overall mortality rate of the Civil War, people died from diseases. People died in training camps from diseases. They died after the battle from diseases. That was the bigger killer,” Whitmarsh said.

“I’m not surprised they had a relatively high mortality rate. These were not soldiers who were in great shape to begin with.”

In addition to the prison camp’s dead, 48 Confederate soldiers are buried there who died while en route to Elmira in the Shohola train wreck on July 15, 1864.

National cemetery

The Confederate section of Elmira’s Woodlawn Cemetery, where prisoners who died at the prison camp were buried, became Woodlawn National Cemetery on Dec. 7, 1877. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on Oct. 6, 2004, according to the National Cemetery Administration, part of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The fact that there are two cemeteries there leads to a lot of confusion, Whitmarsh said.

The only surviving building from the prison camp was reconstructed at the former prison camp site after sitting many years as a disassembled pile of lumber. It was dedicated in 2017. Construction of a recreation of a barracks building was finished in 2018. 

It has been a real surprise to discover how many people had a relative, however many generations back, who was a Confederate prisoner at that camp, Whitmarsh said.

“I hadn’t thought about it that way, that it’s a part of family history,” he said. “It’s the stories that come down through the generations that the ancestor was there.”

ON THE NET

Friends of Woodlawn Cemetery: www.friendsofwoodlawnelmira.org/

John W. Jones Museum: www.johnwjonesmuseum.org/

Elmira Prison Camp: www.elmiraprisoncamp.com/

National Park Service: www.nps.gov/nr/travel/national_cemeteries/New_York/Woodlawn_National_Cemetery.html

National Cemetery Administration: www.cem.va.gov/cems/nchp/woodlawn.asp

Center for Mark Twain Studies: https://marktwainstudies.com/about/mark-twain-in-elmira/

Whitmarsh is glad they come to visit the prisoner of war camp on Winsor Avenue, the Confederate section of the national cemetery on Davis Street and the John W. Jones Museum, also on Davis Street.

“That’s what the place exists for, to talk about that history and that story,” he said.

“These things are available to come see. Come up and visit the area. Come experience our history.”