Woodlawn Cemetery - Carbondale, Illinois - Wikipedia Entries on Waymarking.com

County of cemetery: Jackson County
Location of cemetery: [bordered by] E. Main St., S. Logan Ave., E. Walnut St. (IL 13) & S. Graham Ave., Carbondale

Historical marekr erected by the City of Carbondale and the Illinois State Historical Society in 2001
On April 29, 1868, over 200 veterans and several thousand citizens gathered at Woodlawn Cemetery to honor those who had died in the Civil War. General John A. Logan delivered the keynote address, saying "Every man's life belongs to his country, and no man has the right to refuse when his country calls for it." This memorial service influenced Logan, as Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, to issue G.A.R. General Order No. 11 on May 5, 1868. This order instructed his comrades to observe May 30, 1868, and successive May 30ths, as decoration day by "strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion."

"Woodlawn Cemetery was designed by Carbondale founder Daniel Brush in 1853. Brush originally designed Woodlawn Cemetery with two concentric pathways which were slightly modified over the years. The concentric pathways allowed access to the cemetery plots by horse and wagon. The cemetery includes 217 plots on approximately a 2.5 acre tract and contains over 400 grave sites. Buried at Woodlawn Cemetery are many Union and Confederate soldiers, as well as other prominent townspeople of the mid-to-late 1800s. The last burial at Woodlawn Cemetery occurred in 1954, one hundred years after it was founded."
~ Tablescapes 2004

""Mystery" of the Sarcophagus - A stone coffin, or sarcophagus, sits above ground near the center of the cemetery. There are two versions of who is buried there and the story behind it. The first story is that a young woman from Vicksburg, Mississippi, the wife of J.W. Landrum, was buried in the above ground coffin. She was placed there because she did not want to be buried in Yankee soil. Her husband was a Carbondale native and was said to have sprinkled soil from Vicksburg inside her coffin before the lid was closed.
The second story is that Lt. Colonel John Mills of the Union Army was supposedly buried there. Upon hearing that a Confederate soldier was to be buried at Woodlawn Cemetery, the Mill's family had his body removed from the ground and placed in the sarcophagus so that the two soldiers would not occupy the same land." ~ Tablescapes 2004