Camp Chase Cemetery
Respect for history
Confederate cemetery on West Side gets a cleanup
Tuesday, September 1, 2009 3:13 AM
By Mark Ferenchik
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
CHRIS RUSSELLDispatch photos
Chris Tunchez of Webb Ground Maintenance resets a headstone at Camp Chase Confederate Cemetery along Sullivant Avenue on the West Side. The company also will re-sod the historical site when the headstone work is done. The federal government is spending $120,000 on the work.
Camp Chase headstones are being dug up so they can be raised, leveled and straightened as needed.
Soon after his crew began fixing up Camp Chase Confederate Cemetery in June, Scott Morse watched a teenage girl hop across the tops of headstones as if she were leaping from rock to rock across a creek.
That bothered him. Morse, a Navy veteran, said yesterday that her action showed a lack of respect for those who died in the Civil War.
The cemetery is “a memorial,” he said. “It’s a part of history.”
As such, the federal government is spending $120,000 to clean, straighten and level the headstones and to plant grass at the Hilltop cemetery along Sullivant Avenue.
The project should be finished by early November, said Morse, director of field operations for Webb Grounds Maintenance of Indianapolis.
The cemetery contains 2,133 headstones and as many as 2,260 remains, said Bernie Blizzard, director of the Dayton National Cemetery, which oversees Camp Chase as well. Almost all the dead were Confederate soldiers, Blizzard said.
The federal government owns the 1.8-acre site. The National Cemetery Administration is responsible for maintaining it.
The Hilltop Historical Society has been lobbying the government for years to fix it up, historian Lois Neff said. “A lot of the headstones were askew,” she said. “They were leaning. They weren’t cleaned.”
Camp Chase was more than a prisoner-of-war camp during the Civil War, which ran from 1861 to 1865. Then a sprawling 160 acres, the site also served as a training camp for about 150,000 Union soldiers.
Its name came from President Abraham Lincoln’s treasury secretary, Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. A distant relative, Monty Chase, still lives on the Hilltop near the cemetery.
In addition to a mass grave of soldiers in the southeastern part of the cemetery, bodies also were buried under what is now Sullivant Avenue and under the ball field at St. Mary Magdalene School on Parkside Road.
The headstones were placed in the cemetery in 1936, Chase said.
Neff said young people often smoke and drink in the cemetery, but she hopes they respect the work that’s being done there.
Once it’s done, “it will look the way it’s supposed to look,” she said.
Leave a Reply