See the Ruins of the Alton, Illinois Confederate Prison

A popular destination for walking ghost tours in Alton, Illinois, are the ruins of the Alton Penitentiary. The ruins aren't much but Len Adams and other tour guides of Alton Hauntings Tours will fill you in on the dark deeds of the past as well as the phantom shadows of the present.

The site is located a half-block up Williams Street from Broadway in downtown Alton. The ruins today consist of huge locally-quarried limestone blocks making up what is apparently a corner of the original prison. The rest is pretty much left up to your imagination. The other blocks are long gone, disappeared into the foundations of walls and buildings around Alton, a town located on the Mississippi River.

At one time, the Alton Prison on the west end of town extended from the edge of the water up to the part of town referred to as Christian Hill because of the churches there. During the Civil War, up to 12,000 Confederate soldiers were held at the Alton Prison.

Many never left, especially during the devastating 1863-1864 smallpox epidemic. According to the historical marker at the prison, six to 10 prisoners died daily during this period. That epidemic contributed led to another Alton landmark, the Alton Confederate Memorial marking the mass grave where the remains of many Southern soldiers ended.

The Prison's Origins

Built in 1833 as Illinois's first state prison, the Alton prison was operated privately under a lease from the state. Conditions began to deteriorate from whatever standard there may have been when first established, at least partly due to growing overcrowding. The grim reputation for the prison grew as the years passed until social reformer Dorothea Dix and a new prison in Joliet got it closed by June 1860.

By 1862, it became apparent to the painful surprise of many that the war would be of long duration. Prisoner exchanges were being ended as a way of strangling Southern military manpower, vastly outnumbered by the Federal army. The 256-cell prison was reopened as a military detention camp for rebel prisoners. The first prisoners arrived on February 9, 1862.

Civil War Prison

It took three days to overcrowd the prison. The situation worsened until by war's end, 1,900 prisoners were being held at the forbidding stone structure and as many as seven women. Besides military prisoners, there were those civilians accused of treasonous acts such as aiding escaped Confederate prisoners, making anti-Federal statements, and so on.

Food was bad when not withheld as a punishment, clothing was terrible, no provision was made for bathing, and vermin abounded.

Epidemic!

As often happens in such conditions, disease struck in the form of malaria, dysentery, anemia, pneumonia, and others. In 1863, a smallpox outbreak began. After some smallpox deaths occurred in Alton, the prison and its inmates were quarantined by the civil government.

Prisoners were taken out to a small island in the Mississippi River across from Alton called Sunflower Island for treatment, now remembered as Smallpox Island. Those who went to the island never returned.

Bodies were disposed of in North Alton. Guards would bundle them onto wagons and drive up Hophollow Road to the site where the bodies were buried in unmarked mass graves. The Confederate Soldiers Cemetery today has a 40-foot memorial to honor the Confederate prisoners who died during the epidemic. They are located on Rozier Street, two blocks west of State Street which merges with Williams Street a few blocks north of the ruins and leads uptown. The crossroad beyond the cemetery is Hophollow Road. Don't walk it at night and if driving, don't look back.

A group of nuns from St Louis arrived at the prison in 1864 and treated the Confederate POW's. They established a prison hospital built and another in Alton, the city's first.

After the war the stone from the again closed prison was quarried away by residents for use in construction of walls and foundations. Some former prisoners even fetched a block of stone from the prison to be the headstones for their graves.

When a lock and dam were built on the Mississippi River in the 20th century, Smallpox Island disappeared, remembered only by a historical monument on the Missouri side of the river across from Alton, next to the Lewis-Clark Bridge in the Lincoln-Shields Recreation Area.

Shades of the Past

Today, all that remains all the ghosts. A man in ragged clothing quietly loitering in the dark streets near the park, occasionally a figure seen walking along Hophollow Road where bodies were reportedly sometimes dumped rather than complete the drive out to the cemetery, only Smallpox Island left no mark thanks to the river water backed up by the dam.

The epidemic didn't end until sometime in 1864. An estimated 1,000-5,000 died.

The prison ruins are marked by their own historical marker telling a brief story that fails to capture the pain and suffering that went on there. They mark a dark portion of Alton's historic past, still available for visitors to visit.

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