On November 15, 1861, the War Department leased one half of Johnson’s Island in Sandusky Bay, Ohio, and began constructing a 15-acre prison camp on the southeast shore. When complete, the prison complex included a 14-foot-tall board stockade enclosing thirteen barracks, one used as a hospital, with two external kitchens for each barracks, while forty structures outside the complex housed prison staff and a redoubt with artillery guarded against insurrection. In June 1862, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton ordered all Confederate officers held at Camp Chase prison in Columbus, Ohio, moved to Johnson’s Island, which became the official prison for Confederate officers, although some non-officers were also held there and some officers were interned elsewhere. Over the course of the war, about 12,000 prisoners were confined on Johnson’s Island, and 239 died despite the harsh climate and remote location; the first recorded death was David T. J. Wood on May 6, 1862, and the last was William Michael in June 1865, the month the prison closed. Prisoners who died there were buried in a cemetery about a half mile from the prison, where soft, loamy soil made digging easy but solid bedrock 4-5 feet below ground prevented burials at the customary depth of 6 feet, and each grave was marked with a wooden headboard. After the war, friends or relatives removed more than twenty bodies, and in 1890 marble headstones, 206 in total, were erected through the efforts of Georgia journalists who had visited the cemetery and reported in state newspapers the lack of permanent markers. In 1905, the Robert Patton Chapter, United Daughters of the Confederacy, bought the cemetery and adjacent lot from private owners, linking it for more than twenty years with the chapter’s leader, Mary Patton Hudson, who worked persistently for improvements. After the Commission for Marking Graves of Confederate Dead was authorized in 1906, Hudson lobbied for improvements including a new fence, but Commissioner William Elliott declined to pay to enclose a cemetery the federal government did not own, and she refused to relinquish the property. In 1910, she raised the money for a large monument, a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier sculpted by Moses Ezekiel, and her efforts to improve and beautify the cemetery continued until her death in 1920. In 1931, the United Daughters of the Confederacy donated the cemetery to the U.S. government.