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Graves, Slaves and the United Daughters of the Confederacy

Story and photograph by Kathleen Walls

The United Daughters of the Confederacy monument at Woodlawn Cemetary

Some of American history's most unusual stories were spawned by the War Between the States. Perhaps the most intriguing of these stories brings together the Union's most hellish prison camp, a runaway slave and the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

The tale began with the escape of a young slave named John W. Jones from a Leesburg, Virginia plantation. On June 3, 1844. John had belonged to the Elzy family and, as the head of the family was growing old, the young man feared he would be sold.

He and four others used the Underground Railroad to help their escape. He settled in Elmira , NY and became an active worker for the Underground Railroad. As the respected sexton for the Woodlawn Cemetery across from the First Baptist Church, one of his duties was to bury the dead. For this he was paid $2.50 per burial.

With the advent of the War, Elmira was designated as the site for a prison camp. It had previously been a Union barracks designed to hold 4.000 men. At its peak, it contained over 10,000 Confederate prisoners. There was no housing for over half of the prisoners who had to sleep in the open or in rough tents. Although the prison only operated for one year the casualties were horrific. Poor sanitation, lack of basic necessities and the cold New York winter compounded by a smallpox epidemic earned the prison the nickname Helmira. Just the fear of being captured and sent there struck fear into the sturdiest Confederate soldier.

During the term of the prison's use, John Jones was the person in charge of burying 2,963 prisoners. He was so conscientious in his efforts to award the dead soldiers their proper respect that he undertook personally to locate information about each of the deceased and farther buried any possessions they might have had with them in a small urn just a foot os so deep in each grave. Coffins and small wooden headboards were painted with the name and unit of each soldier. Of all the Confederate prisoners Jones buried, only seven are listed as unknown. His records were so precise that on December 7, 1877 the federal government declared the burial site a national cemetery.

Shortly after the war, the United Daughters of the Confederacy began their project to send home the remains of Confederate soldiers buried under "inhospitable Northern soil." However, when they arrived in Elmira they heard of Jones' care in burying the Confederate dead and other acts of kindness shown by him and other Elmirans during the Confederates imprisonment here. The Daughters made the decision to leave their fallen war heroes to continue to rest in peace in Elmira's Woodlawn Cemetery. The wooden headboards Jones had erected were replaced by the uniform stones now seen at Woodlawn's National Cemetery. When you visit Woodlawn, you will note a slight difference between the stones marking Confederate graves and those of all the other Woodlawn dead. The Confederate stones have a pointed top while the others are rounded. The legend goes that the Daughters of the Confederacy specifically requested the point "so that no damned Yankee will sit on their graves!"

In 1938, the daughters of the Confederacy erected a monument with a granite base and a bronze Confederate soldier to honor the fallen Confederates. It is the northernmost Confederate monument in the United States.

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