This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Classification: Query Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/yYB.2ACI/13956.1 Message Board Post: The mystery has been solved------------------------------------ "Folks digging up old mystery of missing bodies at Camp Chase" by Joe Blundo; November 11, 2004 "Confederate soldier Jonathan P. Lindley died 140 years ago this month, and his great-great-grandson fears he did not rest in peace. ""I would just like to find out where ol' Jonathan's bones are,"" said David McDonald of Powder Springs,Ga. The question also intrigues Civil War buffs who are investigating a long-forgotten case of grave robbing at Camp Chase Confederate Cemetery on the West Side. Camp Chase was a 130-acre compound that served as a Union training camp and a prison for captured Confederate Soldiers. The camp is long gone, but its 2.5-acre cemetery remains on Sullivant Avenue, west of Hague Avenue. It holds the graves of more than, 2,000 Confederate prisoners of war. Like virtually every other old cemetery, Camp Chase is said to be haunted, but that seems trival compared with the real horrors. The prison compound, almost comfortable in its first days, grew crowded, dirty and disease-ridden as the war dragged on. And in its cemetery, even the dead could be disturbed. Marlitta Perkins, a former Columbus resident and a Civil War lecturer, rekindled interest in the grave-robbing story while doing research for her Camp Chase site (www.geocities.com/Pentagon/Quarters/5109/index.html). Perkins, who lives in Kentucky, ran across this Nov. 26,1864, report from Col.W.P. Richardson, post commander: ""On the night of (Nov.) 24th...the bodies of six deceased prisoners were stolen from the graveyard attached to the camp...I arrested the perpetrators of this outrage."" Although the report doesn't identify suspects, three Columbus newspapers the next week indentified one as Joab R. Flowers, a local physician. The Crisis, an anti-slavery newspaper, even quoted Flowers as saying, ""The bodies were those of rebels who were fit for nothing but dissection!"" Stealing and selling bodies for study was a profitable enterprise at the time. The Columbus Gazette said the soldiers' bodies were sold to a Cleveland medical school. Richardson turned the suspects over to the civilian courts, but Franklin County criminal records are missing for the period, said Dennis M. Keesee, New Albany author of Too Young to Die: Boy Soldiers of the Union Army 1861-1865. Keesee and his friend and fellow Civil War buff Dennis Brooke of Georgia have spent many hours trying to fill in details of the incident. One thing they have determined: The grave-robbing accusation seems not to have harmed Flowers' reputation. He went on to serve on the Columbus City Council. The big question, though, is whose bodies were stolen. The investigators say evidence points to six soldiers, including Lindley, a member of a Georgia regiment from Cobb County, Ga. Cpl. Lindley was captured at the Battle of Atlanta in July 1864. He died of pnuemonia Nov. 23, 1864, and cemetery records show that he was buried in grave No. 511. The number suggests that Lindley's grave would have been near Sullivant Avenue, a convenient location for body snatchers seeking a fresh cadaver, Brooke said. Grave No. 511 is not there. Later records say only that Lindley's body was disinterred but not when, why or whether it was reburied somewhere else. McDonald had always assumed that his ancestaor lay at Camp Chase. Now he wonders whether his assumption is 140 years out of date. "