Oak Woods is the final resting place of several famous Americans including
Harold Washington,
Ida B. Wells,
Jesse Owens, and
Enrico Fermi. It is also the setting for a mass grave and memorial for Confederate prisoners of war from
Camp Douglas, called the Confederate Mound.[2]
History
Oak Woods Cemetery was chartered on February 12, 1853.[1] It was designed by landscape architect
Adolph Strauch who created a ‘landscape-lawn cemetery’ on the 183 acres emphasizing grade changes with curving streets and well-planned drainage creating a uniform composition which was free of fences. The first burials took place in 1860.[3][4]
After the
American Civil War (1861–1865), several thousand
Confederate soldiers, prisoners who died at
Camp Douglas, were reburied here. According to a plaque on the site, soldiers were buried in "concentric trenches". A monument and marker, which former Kentucky lieutenant governor
John C. Underwood helped construct, probably inflates the number of soldiers buried as 6,000, but lists the names of more than 4,000.[5][6] Another, smaller memorial commemorates the
Union soldiers who died at Camp Douglas, often from contagious diseases. The bodies from Camp Douglas had originally been buried at Camp Douglas and the City Cemetery, which was closed and removed during expansion of
Lincoln Park and urban renewal following the
Great Chicago Fire of 1871.[7] The bodies were exhumed and re-interred together in a
mass grave, which came to be known as Confederate Mound, reputedly the largest documented
mass grave in the
Western Hemisphere.[8]
In response to the establishment of the Confederate memorial, in 1896, Thomas D. Lowther, a pre-war resident of the South, erected near it an
abolitionist monument.[9] The abolition monument is a large black marble
cenotaph to pre-war southerners, "unknown heroric men", "martyrs" who had opposed slavery and disunion. Near the beginning of the war, Lowther had been forced to flee his home in Florida because of his anti-slavery and pro-Union stance.[10]
The cemetery is also the final resting place of 45 victims of the
Iroquois Theatre fire, in which more than 600 people died.
Famous nuclear physicist
Enrico Fermi has his final resting place here, as do several other faculty members of the
University of Chicago. The cemetery also has a section for U.S. veterans of several wars, and a separately-maintained Jewish section.
Notable burials
In 2022, the Hyde Park Historical Society created an interactive directory application for monuments at the cemetery.[12]
^Wagner, Margaret E.;
Gallagher, Gary W & Finkelman Paul, eds. (2009).
The Library of Congress Civil War Desk Reference. New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, Inc. pp. 605–606, 609.
ISBN978-1439148846. Retrieved 2017-08-17. Although the memorial, erected in the late 1880s, claims 6,000 dead, this is unlikely to be true as significantly fewer (4,454) Confederate prisoners were known to have died at Camp Douglas.