Camp Morton was established on the Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis as a training camp after President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers, and thousands of Indiana volunteers trained there in 1861 before leaving for active duty. After Fort Donelson surrendered on February 16, 1862, the Union army suddenly held 15,000 Confederate prisoners, and Indiana Governor Oliver Morton offered to take 3,000 of them at Camp Morton, which then functioned as a prison. Soldiers enclosed the barracks with a tall fence, built stout gates, and dug latrines before the prisoners arrived, and when the Confederates came without winter clothing or blankets, women of Indianapolis donated both. A prisoner exchange emptied the camp in summer 1862, but it was repopulated in January 1863, and its population fluctuated until the camp closed in June 1865. More than 1,600 Confederates remained buried in Indianapolis's Greenlawn Cemetery, where Indiana had purchased five lots in 1862 for prisoner burials, coffins costing $3.50 each were placed side-by-side in trenches dug by prisoners, and numbered headboards marked the graves. After the war, some remains were removed by friends or relatives, and in 1870 some unclaimed remains were moved to a different cemetery lot owned by the federal government. In 1906, the Commission for Marking Graves of Confederate Dead found that some burials had been moved and the land turned into a city park, so because individual graves could not be identified, a single monument was authorized there; Van Amringe Granite Company of Boston, Massachusetts, completed it in 1909, and bronze plaques listed the names of 1,616 Confederate dead. As development continued around the government lot, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Southern Club of Indianapolis petitioned the federal government to move the Confederate monument to Garfield Park; it was moved in 1928, but the graves remained at Greenlawn until 1931, when the Confederate remains were disinterred and moved to Crown Hill Cemetery, where they were marked by a modest monument. Ten bronze name plaques and a bronze inscription plaque were installed there in 1993. This history also stood within a broader national movement of reconciliation: in 1868 the Grand Army of the Republic decorated Union and Confederate graves at Arlington National Cemetery; in 1901 the War Department created the Confederate section at Arlington; in 1906 Congress created the Commission for Marking Graves of Confederate Dead; by 1916 it had marked more than 25,500 graves and erected monuments where individual graves could not be identified; and in 1930 the War Department authorized adding the Southern Cross of Honor to Confederate headstones.
