Lake Erie Stories by Chad Fraser

Author:Chad Fraser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2008-09-16T04:00:00+00:00

The end finally came for Johnson’s Island on September 5, 1865, five months after the end of the war, when the last of its prisoners were transferred to other facilities. By November 5, prison fixtures were being auctioned off and the walls were torn down.

The island returned largely to its natural state, with little activity other than farming occurring there until 1894, when a small resort, was constructed, only to fail three short years later. Another attempt was made in 1904, but it, too, quickly succumbed, this time to Cedar Point, just across Sandusky Bay. Cedar Point’s owners bought Johnson’s Island and relocated the buildings to their resort. Cedar Point is now one of the premier amusement parks in the United States.

Today, little remains of the Johnson’s Island prison, and the island itself is mainly home to a few small, private cottages and, of course, the graves of those who died there. The quiet cemetery’s crude wooden headstones were long neglected after the dismantling of the prison, but in 1890 a group of Sandusky citizens replaced them with marble markers displaying each prisoner’s name, rank, regiment, and company (where known). According to a plaque at the site, there are 206 individual markers, though 267 sets of human remains have been located using ground-penetrating radar. All of the men interred here, both the known and unknown, are watched over by “The Lookout,” a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier created by Confederate veteran Sir Moses Ezekiel and dedicated in 1910.

Though the Johnson’s Island prisoners have been finally, and properly, given an official memorial, it is the hundreds of unofficial remembrances, perhaps, that best mark the grim and fading memories of a place like the Johnson’s Island prison. The following poem, likely written by a young, war-weary captive yearning for home, was found etched on one of the prison walls after the prisoners had been shipped back to their homes in the South. Lydia Ryall made sure it wasn’t lost to history by recording it in Sketches and Stories of the Lake Erie Islands:

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