BRONZEVILLE — There’s a treasure hunt happening behind Pershing East Magnet School, but the excavators are hoping for buttons instead of gold.
Anthropologists and historians are digging a trench in the school lot at 3200 S. Calumet Ave., looking for remnants of Camp Douglas, the largest and most infamous Union prisoner camp during the Civil War.
At the height of the war in 1864, there were 12,000 Confederate soldiers riddled with disease in 66 barracks on “80 acres of hell” in an area that’s now the Calumet-Giles Historic District, Lake Meadows Shopping Center and other parts of Douglas.
“Over in the Jewel parking lot, you might find some smallpox victims,” said David Keller of the Camp Douglas Restoration Foundation. “They were all in the camp’s smallpox hospital, so they wanted them to be buried right away.”
But Keller and Michael Gregory, an anthropology professor from DePaul University, aren’t about to start ripping up the parking lot in search of those wayward corpses that didn’t make it to Oakwood Cemetery.
Instead, they’ve chosen a spot that would have been at the southwestern corner of the camp, and they’re hoping to hit archaeological pay dirt — a latrine.
Gregory said the soldiers’ bathrooms can be the best place to find artifacts because when something got dropped there, it’s highly unlikely any soldier was going to go in after it.
Keller said he’s still hoping to get access to a vacant lot owned by developer Draper and Kramer where he’s sure there were a lot of latrines, but for the moment they’re satisfied with the current site, where they’ve found a letter “B” that confirms the site was part of Camp Douglas.
Camp Douglas stretched over an area that now includes The Gap, the Calumet-Giles Historic District and Lake Meadows Shopping Center. [Library of Congress]
In October, working a plot just 2 feet from the current dig, volunteers found a “B” that was unmistakably from the hat of a Union soldier. The find confirmed that other objects were likely also from Camp Douglas, including late 19th century undergarment buttons that could now be linked to a soldier’s underwear.
“We know we’re going to find Camp Douglas stuff here,” Gregory said looking down at the new trench being carefully dug. “Most of it will not look terribly exciting.”
The remains of Camp Douglas are 40 inches below the turf, and often the artifacts uncovered on the way down are just as interesting.
Last October while digging with students from Pershing East, volunteers found a revolver.
“The kids thought it was really cool, but it turned out to be a toy,” Keller said.
The toy, along with every bottle cap and button, is carefully saved.
The dig site is being inspected 40 inches down to the Camp Douglas layer in the hopes of also finding Bronzeville artifacts. [DNAinfo/Sam Cholke]
Flipping through old plat maps, Keller said the site was also the backyard for several row houses when the neighborhood was a Jewish enclave and then African-American neighborhood after the Great Migration.
The last dig turned up the cap from a 100-year-old bottle of Worcestershire sauce, a 135-year-old pill bottle and the ceramic cap to a Grommes and Ullrich whiskey bottle from around the time of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.
“When they demolished those houses, a lot of stuff just got thrown into the yard,” Gregory said.
He said even if he’s not interested personally, all of these artifacts get saved for researchers interested in the history of Bronzeville.
Gregory, Keller and about 50 volunteers will be out in the Pershing East field until Tuesday digging.
Kids and neighbors are invited to come out and go over the finds from the site from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Sunday.
Smallpox and other diseases made Camp Douglas hellish for many of the soldiers there. [Civil War Parlour]
Events around Camp Douglas, which was closed 150 years ago this year, will continue through the end of the year.
Paul Durica of the "Pocket Guide to Hell" will host monthly talks and tours of the site through November at Lake Meadows Park, 3117 S. Rhodes Ave.
Durica said Camp Douglas and the Civil War were instrumental in the development of Chicago. He said the railroad industry took off in the city to supply the war efforts with another famous Chicago commodity.
“This is when the meatpacking industry really takes off,” Durica said.
He will host the next talk on the soldiers and guards of Camp Douglas on Aug. 1.
The series will culminate with a Civil War re-enactment on Northerly Island in November.
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