It's Curious City, where we take your questions about Chicago and the region, and investigate, report, explore, from WBEZ.

Hey there, listeners, it's Curia City intern Laura Paven. Recent events in Charlottesville have reignited a conversation about historic monuments.

So, we're replaying a story we produced in 2015. You'll hear our reporter Maraba talk about

installing a plaque last year. She means October 2014.

Hi, I'm Maribonite, and I'm going to answer a history question.

It's not one of those trip down memory lane kind of questions,

where the answer's easy and we're all glad to find it.

This history is dark, and it's strange,

and in the end, we all feel that we should know it,

even if maybe we don't want to.

Our question starts with uptown resident Chris Rowland.

So I was at work one day, and we were just talking, the Civil War came up,

and one of the guys had mentioned that there was actually a prison camp in the actual city of Chicago,

and nobody could even remember what the name of it was.

So he Googled it, but...

Not a whole lot that you can kind of find readily available.

It was troublesome to find anything.

So he sent us a question that went like this.

Why was there a prison camp in Chicago during the Civil War?

And why did so many people die there? What happened to it?

Well, there was a Civil War camp. It was just south of downtown Chicago, where the Bronzeville neighborhood is today. It was called

Camp Douglas, and it was, in fact, one of the deadliest prison camps in the Civil War.

...