As is our norm, as we left Golden Acres Ranch we set out toward Macon using US highways and state roads.  We wanted to see more of Georgia than the interstates and we wanted to avoid going through Atlanta at any time of day.  Along the way we elected, sometimes by choice and sometimes by inadvertence, to go directly through Main Street rather than take the bypass.  We saw many beautiful towns and came across one Landmark House tour that was right along the route.  We also passed by a large group reenacting a Civil War battle.  That was in the appropriately named town of Gray.

Yesterday as we looked at the FMCA atlas we always have open to our route, we noted that we were going to be passing by Andersonville Historic Park and the National Prisoner of War Museum.  They were directly on route 49 which we were traveling along.

A bit of a refresher, in 1864 the South was looking for a place to hold Union prisoners away from battle in a place where there were building materials and a food supply.  They selected Andersonville and began construction of “Camp Sumpter” a 16 acre stockaded area with a stream, Stockade Branch, flowing through it to provide water.  They later expanded the stockade to 22 acres.  The original plan was for 6,000 prisoners then 10,000. Eventually they housed over 20,000 prisoners in a bare stockade forced to build whatever housing they could from material they had with them or could salvage.  The death rate was terrible and through a novel written in the 1950’s it has become known as the most horrible of Civil War POW camps.  There were northern camps that had death rates in the same order of magnitude, some believe to have been as high as 25% of all imprisoned.  Here is a picture taken from the south.  This is a view from a gun emplacement at the southwest corner intended to be able to sweep the entire northern end of the stockade as well as to turn and defend against the Union Army.  The white posts indicate the location of the stockade and the “deadline.”