Johnson’s Island

April 10, 1862: The first prisoners-of-war arrive at Johnson’s Island in Lake Erie near Sandusky, the only Union camp exclusively for internment of Confederates. All told, some 15,000 Confederates would be kept there during the Civil War, the most at any one time reaching 2,800. In 1864, Confederates hatched a plot to capture a gunboat and initiate a mass escape, but it failed.
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