Anderonville and On--February 23

We eat breakfast at the hotel—waffles and coffee. We check out the dining room, pretty spiffy but kind of tired around the edges. We head north out of town to Andersonville and the POW Museum. Wow! Much more interesting that I thought it would be. There are 2 30-minute videos, one on Andersonville and the other on prisoners of war. Both feature lots of personal accounts, the first from letters and the second from letters and actual survivors. We join a walk on the grounds, which explains more clearly what happened at the site during the 14 months if was open. Some 45,000 people passed through the camp, which had 33,000 at its height. About 1,000 died each month from a variety of causes ranging from disease to starving to murder. Only about a third had shelters, which they fashioned out of whatever cloth they had available. Essentially they were marched into the compound, which was surrounded by 15-foot high log walls, and then let to survive as best they could.

While food was short, the most serious problem was water. All the water for the prisoners came from a slow moving stream that ran through the bottom of the hill. Prior to entering the prison area it was used by the Confederate soldiers as their latrine and medical waste was thrown into the stream. In the summer the stream wasted away to a trickle and was seriously polluted by the waste from the Confederates upstream and the latrine area for the prisoners downstream. A mosquito bite could be life threatening if scratched so much that it opened the skin. And Andersonville is below the ‘gnat line,’ that line in Georgia where the gnats in summer are so thick that you have to keep blowing upward to keep them at bay. While there were bad prison conditions in the North, none were as bad as Andersonville where 29% of the prisoners died. In addition, once they were ‘rescued’, thousands of them lost their lives on boats going home.

The POW Museum is set up so that you start with capture and end with ‘coming home.’ It is very well done, with a lot of personal accounts of soldiers and their families. It is very powerful. The greatest fear of the families was that the person that left wouldn’t be the person who came back. I can well understand that.

By 5 PM we are at Jim and Lynn Yates’ home in Acworth. Nice visit. We stay until 7 and then head out for dinner before going to Ann Glendinning and Dale Kelly’s. We are so comfortable with them. They share so many of our values, are interested in the same things, and can discuss it all with tremendous insight.