In the thick of Southern Illinois University’s student ghetto, stretching along Main Street from Logan Avenue to Graham Street in Carbondale, stands an old and curious cemetery. In some ways a typical Victorian graveyard, it’s full of markers commemorating young wives who died in childbirth and clusters of children carried off by epidemics. But what makes these grounds unique are the 60-odd graves containing Civil War soldiers–including a few who died fighting for the Confederacy. Woodlawn Cemetery demonstrates how southern southern Illinois is, how close it was to the action, and how divided were its loyalties.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Cole–whose full-time job is in Governor Ryan’s office, writing policy on economic development and education issues–describes southern Illinois as “right in the middle” of the war between the states. “There were houses around here that were part of the Underground Railroad, and yet there were people who wanted to go with the South,” he says. “U.S. Grant was based in Cairo for six months. John Logan was from Murphysboro. A lot of people here were key players in the war.” And not all of them played for the same side.
Understand the geography and history of southern Illinois and you’ll start to understand how its loyalties could be divided. The first wave of immigrants to the downstate area were Germans from Pennsylvania, says Ken Cochran, president of the Jackson County Historical Society. The second big wave followed Daniel Boone through the Cumberland Gap, and then kept going, traveling down from the Appalachians and west to hilly, fertile counties like Jackson, Williamson, and Alexander, with their magnolia trees and heavy, Faulknerian summers. “They weren’t plantation people,” Cochran says. “But they’d spent a couple of generations in the South, and some of them had slaves at one point or another, and they had Southern sympathies.”
One stone remembers 30 freed slaves, names unknown, who died of smallpox in 1864 soon after arriving in Carbondale.
Though there has been much debate over whether the 1866 Woodlawn ceremony was the first Memorial Day in the nation, it was clearly the first Memorial Day in Illinois. It’s also clear that it was the Woodlawn ceremony that inspired Logan to propose a national holiday, says former Carbondale mayor Helen Westberg. Due to its role in the origin of Memorial Day, Woodlawn Cemetery qualified for listing on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986.
A frequent visitor to Woodlawn, Cole says his favorite spot is in the center of the cemetery, near the grave of Carbondale’s founder D.H. Brush.
