Elmira Prison Camp was established in 1864 on the site of Barracks No. 3 of the Upstate Draft Rendezvous, where Union soldiers had been housed and trained after Elmira became one of New York's three military depots on June 30, 1861, because of its railroad network and later the draft rendezvous for upstate New York when conscription was decreed. The prison compound covered 30 acres along the south side of West Water Street from Hoffman Creek to beyond Foster Avenue and south past Foster's Pond, enclosed by a 12-foot stockade fence. It opened on July 6, 1864, when 399 Confederate prisoners arrived on the Erie Railroad, and in all 12,123 prisoners were assigned there. Death claimed 2,963 of these soldiers, a toll attributed to the prisoners' poor physical condition, an unusually severe winter, and sanitary problems caused by overcrowding, and the Confederate dead were buried in Woodlawn National Cemetery a mile north. Seventeen men escaped from the camp, including 10 in the "great tunnel escape" of October 7, 1864; among them was Sergeant Benny Benson of Company A, Sharpshooters, 1st South Carolina volunteers, who made his way through Canton, Williamsport, Harrisburg, and Baltimore to his old regiment at Richmond, Virginia. The camp officially closed on July 10, 1865. John W. Jones, born in slavery near Leesburg, Virginia, escaped north by the Underground Railroad and reached Elmira in 1844; as sexton of Woodlawn Cemetery, he oversaw the burial of Confederate soldiers who died at the camp and kept a record of each man's name, rank, regiment, and date of death.