Spring 2022-On the Road Again!: Day 17

We spent last night at the Georgia Veterans State Park on Lake Blackshears in Cordele, Ga. It was a typical Georgia State Park, which meant it was exceptionally clean, with spacious camp sites and very clean bathrooms.

Site #12, Lake Blackshear Resort aka Georgia Veterans' State Park

Site #12

On our way out of the state park we visited the Veterans museum which focused how Georgia veterans served in all of our wars. That's a B-29 in the foreground.

On our way to Andersonville we passed countless pecan orchards which won't be ready to harvest until the fall, but the watermelons were ripe and ready for market!

Pecan leaves

ANDERSONVILLE NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE

Our first stop of the day was the Andersonville Historic Site which commemorates not only the Confederate prison, Camp Sumter, but also has a museum dedicated to all POW's of all US wars, and lastly hosts the Anderson National Veterans Cemetery which serves all veterans and their wives.

The POW museum was extremely moving, especially the Vietnam POW's some of whom spent over seven years in captivity. How Donald Trump could, "all POW's are suckers or losers..." proves the man has no heart, no soul. I've never been to any of the German concentration camps, but I can only imagine how moving it much be to visit any of them.

Leaving the museum we then toured the Andersonville prison. When the Civil War began, neither the Union nor the Confederacy believed the war would last more than 90 days, so neither anticipated the need for a prison. The Andersonville prison, opened in February 1864, only operated for 14 months. It was built to hold a maximum 10,000 prisoners, but at it's peak it housed 33,000 prisoners, and over the 14 months over 45,000 prisoners were there, and 13,000 odied while there.

Conditions were brutal. Most of the deaths were not battle related, but instead a result of infections and diseases. The only source of water for prisoners was a stream that ran through the middle of the camp. The prison guards were housed upstream from the stockade, so all their waste flowed contaminated the stream before it ever got to the prisoners.

The stone marker indicates the location of one of the corners of the stockade. The white vertical stakes on the left indicate the location of the stockade and the white markers on the right indicate the location of the "dead line".

The hill in the background descends to the stream that provided the only water for the prisoners.

A reminder of the beauty that does exist in this world.

We stopped for a very late lunch in Macon at the Ocmulgree Brew Pub. The temp was a humid 88°, so the cold beer, delicious cheeseburgers, and fries were very well received. Those are peach slices on the burger!

By the time we arrived at this park, it was already 4:30 PM, and closing was at 5:00 PM, so we had a quick tour of Indian mounds that date back to 1100 AD and earlier.

This one was called the Earth Lodge and it was believed to be used for special ceremonies. It is estimated that 10 million baskets of dirt, each weighing 60 pounds, were used to build this mound. The Ocmulgee are just another example of the sophisticated civilizations that existed in the Western hemisphere long before Europeans came here and claimed it for themselves.