More on John Jones, the Sexton from historian Michael Gray:
John W. Jones, held in bondage by the Elzy family in Leesburg, had escaped along the Underground Railroad in 1844. Jones had resettled in Elmira, gained an education at a local school, and advanced to the position of sexton at Woodlawn Cemetery by the time the prison opened in July 1864. At the end of that month, Commissary General Hoffman approved three hundred dollars for leasing a half acre of ground at the local cemetery to bury dead Confederates, and authorized employment of a person to bury them for forty dollars a month. Jones held his modest job at a fortuitous time, for he soon found that the morbid business of death boomed while the prison existed. To help the sexton transfer corpses, Hoffman allowed a wagon to be purchased and modified into a hearse.40 “The first day that I was called in my capacity of sexton to bury a prisoner who had died,” wrote Jones, “I thought nothing of it.… Directly there were more dead. One day I had seven to bury. After that they began to die very fast.”41 By 1865, Southern interments were becoming more expensive and expansive as the cemetery began running out of room. On January 1, 1865, Mayor Arnot leased out an additional half-acre of land at Woodlawn, which cost the government $600. Also, undoubtedly to the chagrin of Hoffman, Jones was not paid a monthly fee of $40 but was instead compensated at an individual rate set at $2.50 per burial.
In the meantime, a customized hearse driven by John Donohoe for $60 per month had been pulling up to the morgue for its daily collection. Inmates employed at the prison camp morgue, a sixteen-by-thirty-by-twelve-foot building, prepared their own for burial, constructing pine coffins as fast as they could while corpses piled up in the corners.43 Clothing and personal items of the deceased were to be left alone, and each cadaver was tagged for identification, which included name, company, regiment, and date of death. These records were transcribed onto the coffin lid, then the papers were bottled and put in the box before it was nailed shut. The straight-shaped coffins were loaded six at a time onto the hearse for removal to Woodlawn, a few miles north of the pen.44 This “admirable system” provoked one Confederate to state sarcastically that at Elmira “the care of the dead was better than that bestowed on the living.”
At Woodlawn, Sexton Jones directed the opening of trenches, most of which were positioned north to south. Caskets were placed in short increments, and a crew of ten to twelve prisoners on graveyard detail helped with the digging. The largest number that Jones buried in a single day was forty-three, which brought more than $100 to him, while his busiest month, March, brought him $1,237.50.46 This is not to suggest that the sexton did not earn his pay. He meticulously transferred the information on each coffin lid into a large ledger that detailed the position of every Confederate buried at Woodlawn. He made sure that the wooden headboards had the correct information written on them in white lead paint, and then placed them over the appropriate plot. Nine laborers were on the quartermaster’s payroll, each paid forty-five dollars per month to set headboards that local carpenter William F. Naefe had built.
Eventually, workers dug more than thirty-six trenches and laid to rest 2,973 Confederates at Woodlawn Cemetery.48 Incidentally, it would have cost Prison Commissary Hoffman only $480 if the Sexton had been paid monthly. Instead, Hoffman paid him a total of $7,432.50 for prisoner burials. The old slave had adapted quite well to the capitalistic North. Long after the end of hostilities, a personal friend of Jones remembered the significance of the Confederate burials at $2.50 apiece: “The aggregate of these fees was the basis of the comfortable fortune he amassed in the years after the war. He was rated as the wealthiest colored man in this part of the State.”
Gray, Michael. The Business of Captivity: Elmira and Its Civil War Prison . The Kent State University Press. Kindle Edition.