My parents arrived!
They flew all night just to see us for 1.5 days! ♥️
After some down time at the house, we went out for pizza in Americus. Roman Oven again, of course!
Foot update: nothing showed up in the x-rays or bloodwork. Still hurts. But I can gently walk on it if I’m careful. Getting a short medical boot to help protect it.
Andersonville Prison, just a few miles away, was a POW camp during the U.S. Civil War. Brian took us on a short tour.
Video Takeaway:
- Hundreds of Union troops arrived for internment at the prison camp every day, even before the fence/stockade was completed.
- Though the original plans included prisoner barracks, no shelter was ever provided
Video Takeaway:
- Andersonville Prison was severely overcrowded and the water supply (a small creek) quickly became fouled by human waste.
- The men became desperate and dug wells with whatever they could find–even their fingernails.
Extra horrible fact: When the prisoners were given their scanty rations, it was uncooked food–raw meat and dry, ground corn (including the cob, which was normally sifted out, but the prison had no sifters big enough). The cob in the corn mixture acted like tiny shards of glass in the intestines of the prisoners, many of whom already suffered from dysentary. The Confederates eventually did build a cookhouse, just outside of the stockade near where the creek went into the camp. But they still didn’t take the cob out of the corn before cooking it for the prisoners. They used the clean-ish water, and dumped waste a little downstream. This fouled the water even before it reached the prisoners.
Video Takeaway:
- Living conditions were terrible. So many people died in Andersonville Prison that the Confederate government shut it down in stages.
- When the prisoners left, the fleas and lice had no one left to feed off of and swarmed to nearby farms, causing locals to move away.
The stockade (the giant fence) went all around the camp. If a prisoner got too close to the stockade, he would be shot. The “deadline” was marked by a wooden railing on posts
Below: one of the capped wells the Union prisoners dug.
Below: Providence Spring. When things were very, very bad, a thunderstorm rolled through the area. A bolt of lightning stuck the ground a little way up the hill from the creek and provided a new, fresh source of water.
Then it was back to Ellaville and air conditioning (it’s really hot and humid).
Ahhhh!
Meandering Meltons 