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During the Civil War, Point Lookout was one of the largest prisons of CSA POWs. Many men died there from exposure, malaria, scurvy and TB. Originally, the soldiers were buried in two cemeteries near the prison camp. However, because the cemetery land started to erode into the Chesapeake, in 1870 the state of Maryland removed the remains. In 1910 they were moved again and re-interred in a burial trench one mile inland, near where a federal monument was constructed that year. The 80-foot granite obelisk marks the site, just outside Point Lookout State Park, but the actual boundaries of the pit are not marked.