The first burials took place in 1860 . After the 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 . 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 . They were exhumed and reinterred together in a mass grave , which came to be known as Confederate Mound , reputedly the largest mass grave in the Western Hemisphere . 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 . 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 . The Confederate memorial is No. 6 on the Make It Right Project 's 2018 list of the 10 Confederate monuments it most wants removed
Great Chicago Fire
Great Chicago Fire
Oak Woods Cemetery