When President Abraham Lincoln called for volunteers to suppress the southern rebellion in April 1861, thousands of men rushed to Camp Jackson in Columbus, Ohio, and authorities established Camp Chase after volunteers overwhelmed that hastily created camp in a city park. Camp Chase remained a Union training camp throughout the war, but it also became a prison camp beginning in June 1861 when the first prisoner arrived, and by November it held nearly 300 prisoners, many of them Northern civilians charged with aiding the Confederacy. After Fort Donelson surrendered on February 16, 1862, the federal government, faced with housing 15,000 prisoners, converted several training camps, including Camp Chase, into prison camps. When prisoner exchanges ceased in summer 1863, Camp Chase's population rose to more than 2,000 men. The camp operated for the duration of the war, and by July 1865 all remaining prisoners had been released. By the time Camp Chase closed in 1865, more than 2,000 Confederate soldiers were buried here in graves marked with wooden headboards. After the war, family and friends removed 126 bodies, and later the remains of ninety-nine Confederates buried in Columbus City Cemetery and at Camp Dennison near Cincinnati were reinterred here. In 1879, the U.S. government bought the property. Privately funded improvements and annual memorial observances began in 1893 under the direction of William Knauss, a former Union soldier, who hired Henry Briggs, a local farmer, to maintain the cemetery, installed the memorial boulder, and formed the Camp Chase Memorial Association to raise funds to decorate the Confederate graves and erect a formal memorial. The existing granite arch topped by a zinc soldier was erected in 1902. In 1908, after individual graves were determined to be identifiable, the Commission for Marking Graves of Confederate Dead installed headstones, metal fencing atop the stone wall, and a decorative entrance gate to better secure the cemetery. Broader reconciliation followed the Civil War: on May 30, 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 and marked graves with pointed-top marble headstones; five years later Congress created the Commission for Marking Graves of the Confederate Dead to identify and mark Confederates who died in Northern prisons, later expanding its mission to all national cemeteries containing Confederate burials. Four former Confederate officers headed the commission over its lifetime, and by 1916 it had marked more than 25,500 graves and erected monuments where individual graves could not be identified. In 1930, the War Department authorized the addition of the Southern Cross of Honor to Confederate headstones.
