In late 1861, Union Gen. Henry Halleck received permission to use the former Illinois State Penitentiary in Alton, Illinois, as a military prison. The old prison had 256 cells, a hospital, a warden's house, and long-standing problems with drainage and sanitation, though a U.S. Army inspector reported that it could house up to 1,750 prisoners. The first 1,640 prisoners arrived in early March 1862, most of them captured at Fort Donelson after its surrender on February 16, 1862. Within months smallpox broke out and remained a constant plague, leading the army to build hospitals on islands in the Mississippi River, where prisoners and Union soldiers who died were buried and their remains never moved to the mainland. Between February 1862 and the end of the war, 11,760 Confederate prisoners entered the prison at Alton, and nearly 1,300 died there and were buried on the grounds. Lt. Col. Sidney Burbank ordered that prisoners who died be decently interred within the burial grounds set apart in Alton, with proper marks affixed to their graves. They were placed in individual coffins in trenches, each grave marked with a numbered stake, and W.H. Hart buried most of the dead and kept a record book of the interments. The federal government assumed ownership of the cemetery in 1867. In 1899, U.S. Army quartermaster clerk Henry Nichols inspected the site and, after speaking with Hart, concluded that even with the record book it was utterly impossible to identify the graves of those buried there. The Commission for Marking Graves of Confederate Dead unsuccessfully tried to document the burials in 1907, then hired Van Amringe Granite Company to erect the existing 57-foot-tall obelisk, completed in December 1909. Bronze plaques on its base contain the names of 1,354 soldiers buried there and in the smallpox hospital cemetery, while civilians who died at the prison were omitted. The cemetery also reflects a broader movement toward reconciliation after the Civil War: in 1868 the Grand Army of the Republic decorated Union and Confederate graves at Arlington National Cemetery; President William McKinley later declared that every soldier's grave from the war was a tribute to American valor and urged shared care for Confederate graves; the War Department created the Confederate section at Arlington in 1901; Congress established the Commission for Marking Graves of Confederate Dead in 1906 to identify and mark Confederates who died in Northern prisons; and by 1916 the Commission 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.