Southern exposure

"They stand in five neat rows," Don Davenport writes regarding the cluster of markers at Madison's Forest Hill Cemetery, "numbered through 140, each bearing a name, company and regiment, and the inscription 'C.S.A.,'" for Confederated States of America. "There are individual Confederate burials further north, of course," cemetery director Bill Jones tells Davenport. "But this is probably the northernmost Confederate cemetery in the country." The dead include prisoners of war captured during an April 1862 battle. The first of 1,156 Confederate POWs - many ill with diarrhea and pneumonia - arrived at Camp Randall later that month, Davenport reports. "By the end of May," he writes, "114 Confederates had died and the camp was seething with unrest." Many of the remaining prisoners were moved to Chicago, he adds, and other survivors, upon recovery, to Camp Douglas. Alice Whiting Waterman, a Madison resident and Louisiana native, tended Forest Hill's Confederate graves from 1866 until her death in 1897, and was buried alongside "her boys," Davenport writes, and granite headstones replaced the original wooden markers. "Taking care of them is just something we do," says Jones. Now retired, Jones still lives in Madison.