Georgia: Macon & Andersonville

If you've looked at my High Noon photos, you've seen me with Tawsha and Reggie, a couple of Warcraft friends who I visited for three nights in Macon, Georgia.  Most of my sightseeing in Georgia was not in Macon because Tawsha and Reggie have a very low opinion of their town and they were loathe to subject me to it.  Fine with me, as I was there to see them and not whatever city they happened to live in.

Reggie & Tawsha & two of their six pets

Reggie and Tawsha were extremely generous with their time and their care of me, especially considering Tawsha had a hurt knee and was on crutches the whole time.  They fattened me up with several home-cooked southern meals, and we went out to eat a couple of times at similarly fattening places.  (Tip for noobs:  In Georgia, when the menu describes something as "butter dipped," expect your food to arrive having been dipped in a vat of hot butter.)  The food was great but so much richer than I'm used to.  After a couple days, I was craving puffed rice.

Tawsha adds a can of cream of mushroom soup to her macaroni  & cheese.  Yum!

One of our two day trips was to the Andersonville Prison Camp, which was the largest Southern POW camp for Union soldiers during the Civil War and was apparently one gigantic hellhole.  (Huh, I just used the word "hellhole" as slang just now, but apparently, that's what everyone called the place.)  It was build to hold 10,000 people but quickly grew to hold 32,000.  Over its year plus of existence, 45,000 men passed through it, and about 1/3 died of disease or starvation.  Real crappy.

The grounds of the former prison camp.

A re-created corner of the camp walls and prisoner-made tents.

Andersonville is also home to the National Prisoner of War Museum, which we toured and which was pretty educational.  It covered POWs from all eras, with displays, letters home, official documents, etc.  I found a quote from and some information about Natalie Crouter, the author of Forbidden Diary, which was a diary she kept while a civilian internee of the Japanese during WWII.  The internees were not permitted to write anything or even keep writing material.  But she wrote anyway, on anything she could find, detailing her time in the camp.  She was also a friend of my grandma's, which is why I know her name and have a copy of her book (and which I will now finally make an effort to read).

After the civil war, Clara Barton and others took charge of moving the Union soldiers who were buried in mass graves near the prison to a National Cemetery right nearby.  So of course, Tawsha, Reggie and I toured that as well.  The majority of occupants of the cemetery are from the Civil War but some are from later times.  Unlike the other National Cemeteries I've seen, this one was notable for how tightly packed the graves are.  I'm guessing, but don't know for sure, that the people who moved the bodies were just overwhelmed with how many there were and couldn't plot out a normal graveyard.  Here are a few highlights:

These are all Union soldiers.  The six graves in the close-up of this photo were the leaders of the Andersonville Raiders, a group of prisoners who started stealing from, beating, and in a few cases, murdering other prisoners.  In response to the raiders, a larger group of prisoners asked their captors for permission to capture and put on trial the raiders.  Most raiders were given some lesser form of punishment, but the six leaders were put on trial sentenced to hanging.  Their graves are set apart from the other men who died in Andersonville.

In all of the National Cemeteries, there is only one "standard" gravestone that differs from the rest.  Here it is.  The dove is not original to the gravestone.  No one knows when it was added, why, or by whom.  Also note how tightly packed all of the stones are.

You know, before I set out on my trip across the U.S., I anticipated taking a lot of photos of falling-down barns, because they are really cool.  Turns out I didn't take a single photo of a falling-down barn, but instead took hundreds of photos of graveyards.  I'm not sure why I didn't realize my love of graveyards before this trip, but I sure do know it now.  My apologies to those readers who are not interested in headstones, because you've seen a lot of them in my blog!  :)  And for those who love them, you'll really enjoy my next post...  ;-)