The Story of Johnson’s Island – Part 3 - Lorrie Halblaub

These writings are excerpts from the memoirs of Alice Coffin Arnold.  Her family lived on Bayshore Road across from today’s causeway to Johnson’s Island. Alice’s grandfather the Rev. Nehemiah Coffin, and his family, had moved to Bayshore Road in the 1850s.

While the prison camp was being built, the Coffin family boarded the engineers and surveyors in their home. Her family watched as the prison camp for Southern officers, who were prisoners of war, was being built on forty acres of the 300-acre island. Though she was born in 1892, she was, in her words, “raised on stories of the prison and the prisoners.”

The first prisoners started arriving on April 10, 1862.  Alice recounts:  My mother (Alice Hogg Coffin) told us that her mother (Mary Driver Hogg) lived in Sandusky then and took a large kettle of soup down to the railroad station where the prisoners were transferred from trains to boats on the last leg of their journey to Johnson’s Island. It must have been winter, but not cold enough for the boats to stop running. “Mother was a child then, but she remembers the poor prisoners, scared of ice…crawling on hands and knees. Cups of soup were ladled out to the poor hungry men.  Some wept, touched by a bit of kindness shown by Northerners.”

In warmer weather, Alice’s father, Henry Coffin, had the job of taking vegetables and milk by sailboat to the shore near the prison where he met the Sutler, who purchased the supplies for the camp. The Sutler was a civilian who was authorized to run a store near the camp. Henry soon proved himself trustworthy enough to land on the island and came to know guards and a few prisoners. In later years Henry delivered 100 pounds of grapes every day in season.  “How the prisoners liked them!” he wrote.

Some of the guards would go to the Coffin home to visit on their time off.  One of them, Mr. Duroy, was courting Miss Jennie Hartshorn. [Hartshorn Road is named for that family.] By 1862, Rev. Coffin was helping the regular chaplain, Mr. McCune, minister to the prisoners. There were 1,200 prisoners by then.

Not all visits were pleasant.  “Two men were shot there a few days ago.  Four men are to be hung and another one shot soon.  It makes us sad to look on them.” But Johnson’s Island was one of the better camps.  A prisoner once showed Henry a letter from a prisoner at Camp Chase, near Columbus.  He said “our daily rations were a loaf of bread and small piece of fresh meat. Very seldom we’d get two potatoes and an onion.  I wished for a dog to catch a rat for me, but some hungry Reb would’ve eaten the dog.”  Rat pie was a favorite meat that they said tasted like chicken. Camp Chase had a prisoner death rate of 343.1 per 1,000.  Johnson’s Island camp was a similar size and had a death rate of 35.2 per 1,000.

More on what it was like to be a prisoner on Johnson’s Island next month.