Andersonville Prison

Being the great history student in school, I grew to adulthood thinking that Andersonville was a Civil War Battlefield.  (Okay, scoffers, there are prolly a lot more people nodding than snorting at this moment.)  At least I associated it with the Civil War.  Anyway here are the facts:  Andersonville National Historic Site is the only National Park System area to serve as a memorial to all American prisoners of war.  The Site consists of the National Prisoner of War Museum, the Andersonville National Cemetery and the prison site.  We arrived in time for the volunteer led tour of the prison compound.  The prison was a cleared dirt hill leading down to a creek.  The water was used for drinking where the creek entered the prison walls, for a bath in the middle, and for an outhouse where the creek left the prison walls and flowed into a swamp.  During heavy rains the GA clay ran off the hillside and mucked up the water, and the swamp overflowed and pushed the effulance back toward the clear end of the creek.  Death from dysentery and diahrea followed in rapid order.  The prison pen initially covered about 16 1/2 acres enclosed by a 15 foot high stockade.  It was enlarged to 26 1/2 acres in June 1864.  The stockad was in the shape of a parallelogram 1620 feet long and 779 feet wide.  Sentry boxes  stood every 30 feet.   About 19 feet inside the wall was the "deadline."  The prisoners were forbidden to cross upon threat of death.  There were two entrances and eight small earthen forts around the exterior of the prison equipped with artillery.  The prison was originally designed to hold 10,000 men but the largest held at any one time was 32000.

 

 

Scattered around the grassy hillside of the former prison are various monuments.  These were erected by the states from which the prisoners hailed.  This is the Ohio monument.

 

Since there was no cover, the men sometimes tried to tunnel under the stockade.  This tunnel ended up with a tree growing in it.  The tunnels never worked.  The usually collapsed or were discovered.

This is one corner gate  the length of the facing wall showed the area of the deadline.  The creek is the brown line in the lower left.



Gate show in wall above with wicket door.

Corner diagonally across the prison.  Some of the various shelters are represented.  Most were scattered sticks with a blanket thrown over them.  Some were wood huts in which 4 or 5 men got out of the elements.  Quite a lot just dug into the ground and covered up with their blanket.

 The white posts show where the inner and outer stockate walls ran with the deadline between them.

The POW museum has a nice little theater in which we viewed two short films--one on the prison and one a documentary featuring prisoners of war from the Civil War (through re-enactors and pictures) to the Gulf War.  Artifacts and exhibits from all American wars are on display.  Below is the original loxk and key from the main gate at Andersonville.  Two exhibits I found interesting was the bamboo hut prison from the Vietnam war and the cell from the Korean War with nothing but a hard bed frame and ankle manacles.  Yechh!

A large pard of the Site consists of the cemetery.  In July and August 1865 Clara Barton, a detachment of laborers and soldiers, and a former prisoner named Atwater came to Andersonville cemetery to identify and mark the graves of the Union dead.  As a prisoner Atwater was assigned to reord the names of the deceased.  Fearing loff of the death record at war's end, Atwater made his own copy.  Thanks to his list only 460 of the Andersonville graves are marked unknown. 

This is one small corner of the cemetery.

The graves are close together for a reason.

Click on the pic to read. 

 

 

The cemetery is a National Historic Site but veterans  are still buried there in one corner. 

 

Next visit--Plains

 

Louise and Duane