The Confederate POW camp in Andersonville, GA was one of the worst. We went today, and found that it is also a National cemetery. There is a museum dedicated to all POW's (not just the Union soldiers), but it was closed due to Covid.
12,920 Union soldiers died here, at one point 100 per day. The stream that ran through the camp was planned to provide fresh water, but the prison guards' camp was above, and their waste flowed into the prison camp, contaminating the water and causing dysentery and other illnesses. The bottom of the camp turned into a swamp, adding to the misery.
A spring appeared after a lightening storm, and the prisoners named it Providence Spring, as it provided much needed fresh water.
From the National Park website:
Andersonville National Historic Site began as a stockade built about 18 months before the end of the U.S. Civil War to hold Union Army prisoners captured by Confederate soldiers. Located deep behind Confederate lines, the 26.5-acre Camp Sumter (named for the south Georgia county it occupied) was designed for a maximum of 10,000 prisoners. At its most crowded, it held more than 32,000 men, many of them wounded and starving, in horrific conditions with rampant disease, contaminated water, and only minimal shelter from the blazing sun and the chilling winter rain. In the prison's 14 months of existence, some 45,000 Union prisoners arrived here;of those, 12,920 died and were buried in a cemetery created just outside the prison walls.
The cemetery site serving Camp Sumter was established as Andersonville National Cemetery on July 26, 1865. By 1868, the cemetery held the remains of more than 13,800 Union soldiers whose bodies had been retrieved after their deaths in hospitals, battles, or prison camps throughout the region. Andersonville National Cemetery has been used continuously since its founding and currently averages over 150 burials a year. The cemetery and associated prison site became a unit of the National Park System in 1970.
After Andersonville we drove to Cordele. For some reason, they have a Titan missile on display there!
It was a nice drive, through beautiful farmland, and huge pecan farms. Really a pretty area when you get off of I-75!
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| The prisoners were buried in mass graves, shoulder to shoulder, as they couldn't make coffins fast enough. |
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| A reproduction of what the stockade looked like |
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| Providence Spring, where the fresh water appeared |
