Camp Chase was named for Salmon P. Chase, former governor of Ohio and Secretary of the Treasury in President Abraham Lincoln’s Cabinet. In July 1861, a small prison was built there to handle an influx of political prisoners and disloyal citizens, and it was enlarged in the fall of 1861 to hold Confederate prisoners of war. By March 1862, it consisted of three separate prisons and held more than 1,200 prisoners, mostly officers captured at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in Tennessee. The prison population kept growing and reached 9,045 in February 1865, but overcrowding, food shortages, and poor sanitation led to outbreaks of typhoid fever and other diseases that caused many deaths. Nothing of the original camp survives today except the cemetery. The Camp Chase Confederate Cemetery lies south on Sullivant Avenue, two blocks west of Hague Avenue, and contains more than 2,100 Confederate soldiers’ graves. During the Civil War, about 25,000 Confederate captives and more than 150,000 Union troops passed through Camp Chase, along with four future presidents: Andrew Johnson, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, and William McKinley.
