Andersonville Confederate Prison Camp
By Jamie Baker
You know I’m not a big fan of the federal government. I hate a lot of the ways they spend our tax dollars.
But the National Parks Service is growing on me.
On our trip recently, the wife and I visited a pair of historic sites run by the National Parks Service — Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace in Kentucky and the Civil War camp in Andersonville, Ga.
The trip to Andersonville piqued my curiosity the most.
When we got there at about midday on a Saturday afternoon it was about 97 degrees according to the digital thermometer in the car.
After reading some of the accounts from the prisoners at the site at the National POW Museum also located at the site, I began to realize what a hellish place Andersonville must have been for the 45,000 Union soldiers who were imprisoned there from 1864 to 1865.
We baked under the hot Georgia sun as we walked around the facility where approximately 13,000 Union soldiers died and are now interred in a cemetery on the park grounds.
I could hardly imagine what those 25,000 prisoners packed into the 26-acre site went through each day with little or no food and the only drinking water coming from a small polluted creek which ran through the camp. There are too many stories to tell from our trip to Andersonville.
Here’s a link that tells you more about the camp and if you are a history buff like me it’s a fascinating website.
If you ever get down that way in southern Georgia, it’s certainly worth the trip. And best of all it’s free.


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