Two days after the first shots at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, Indiana Governor Oliver Morton offered President Lincoln ten thousand volunteers. Morton and his adjutant general, Lew Wallace -- who would later write the novel Ben-Hur -- chose the Indiana State Fairgrounds as the mustering point. The first recruits arrived on April 17, 1861, and the camp was renamed in the governor's honor. The transition from agricultural fairground to military facility was improvised at every turn: cattle stalls became sleeping quarters, office space became guardhouses. By February 1862, after the fall of Fort Donelson in Tennessee, the camp's purpose shifted again. On February 22, the first Confederate prisoners arrived by train, and within three days their number swelled to thirty-seven hundred. Local Indianapolis residents helped provide food, clothing, and nursing care to the overwhelmed facility.

Colonel Richard Owen took command as the camp's first prison commandant, and his approach was unlike anything seen at other Union facilities. With few guidelines from Washington on how to run a prison camp, Owen wrote his own rules, which became a model for other camps. His discipline was strict but humane, allowing prisoners a measure of self-government. A bakehouse gave Confederate prisoners work and the means to earn small wages. Excess rations were converted into a fund for additional supplies. Prisoners formed musical clubs and theatrical groups, played ballgames, whittled, and attended band concerts. A photographer was permitted to make daguerreotypes of prisoners to send home to their families in the South. Owen was guarding more than four thousand men with barely one regiment and 202 additional soldiers -- a fraction of the manpower that Camp Chase in Columbus, Ohio used to guard a thousand. Yet order held. When Owen departed in June 1862 to rejoin active service, the Confederate prisoners he left behind would remember his kindness for the rest of their lives. He went on to become the first president of Purdue University in 1873.

Camp Morton's conditions worsened dramatically after Owen left. By 1863, buildings were crumbling and little was spent on repairs. The camp cycled through a series of commandants -- Biddle, Guthridge, Hamilton -- before Colonel Ambrose Stevens took charge in October 1863. A medical inspector's report that month painted a grim picture: 2,362 prisoners, a mortality rate exceeding 12.45 percent, dilapidated structures, poor drainage, and lax discipline. Stevens improved conditions with better blankets, food, and medical care, but the damage was deep. In July 1864, the prisoner population peaked at 4,999, and overcrowded barracks combined with summer heat brought malaria and other illnesses. Escape attempts grew elaborate -- tunnels, crude ladders, planned uprisings. Roughly thirty-five men escaped between April and October 1863. Between 1862 and 1865, the camp averaged fifty deaths per month. More than 1,700 prisoners died within its boundaries.

The story of Camp Morton's dead is a story of repeated displacement. Confederate prisoners were initially buried at Greenlawn Cemetery on Indianapolis's southwest side. In 1866, a fire destroyed the cemetery office records, erasing the precise locations of burials. In the 1870s, construction of engine houses and tracks for the Vandalia Railroad forced the remains to be dug up and reburied in a mass grave. In 1906, the U.S. government sent Colonel William Elliot to locate that grave, and in 1912 the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument was erected at the site. That monument was later moved to Garfield Park in 1928, and the memorial there was dismantled in June 2020. Finally, in 1931, the remains of 1,616 Confederate soldiers and sailors were transferred to Crown Hill Cemetery, where ten bronze plaques now bear their names at Confederate Mound in Section 32.

After the war, the Indiana State Fair returned to the site in 1868 and remained until 1891, when the State Board of Agriculture sold the grounds for $275,100 to three Indianapolis businessmen. New streets and drainage ditches replaced the prison walls, and the property was platted into a residential neighborhood called Morton Place, now part of the Herron-Morton Place Historic District. Today, nothing of the military camp remains above ground. The prisoners, the guards, the makeshift hospital and bakehouse -- all of it is buried beneath homes and sidewalks. But the memorials persist: Owen's bronze bust at the Statehouse, the plaques at Crown Hill, the historical markers scattered across Indianapolis. They remind passersby that this quiet residential neighborhood was once one of the largest Union prison camps in America, where roughly 3,200 men waited at any given time for a war to end and a chance to go home.