Oak Woods Cemetery is home to Confederate Mound, the largest Confederate burial ground in the northern United States. The Confederate soldiers interred here were imprisoned and died at Camp Douglas, a Civil War prison camp located in what is now Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood from 1862 to 1865. The camp was built in 1861 as a training center for Union soldiers but converted to a prison camp in 1862 when Union forces needed a place to detain Confederate prisoners captured by General Ulysses S. Grant at the Battle of Fort Donelson.

Of the more than 30,000 Confederate soldiers imprisoned at the camp between 1862 and 1865, about 4,500 died. Typhoid, tuberculosis, and other diseases were endemic, fed by unhygienic conditions and malnutrition. Soldiers who died were buried first in City Cemetery but were reinterred in a mass grave in Oak Woods Cemetery when the city turned City Cemetery into Lincoln Park in the 1860s. The monument that accompanies Confederate Mound was dedicated in 1895. The granite base and bronze plaques with the names of the dead were added in 1911.

Oak Woods Cemetery opened in 1853. It was designed by Adolph Strauch, who was a leader in the nineteenth-century movement to design welcoming, peaceful, and park-like cemeteries. Over two hundred thousand people are buried here, including track and field star Jesse Owens, activist Ida B. Wells, and Chicago mayor Harold Washington.

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