Hi All I just got back from Vacation. On our way home from Florida we came through GA and stopped at Andersonville for the day. Talk about a sobering experience. For those that have not been there I will tell somethings about it. You enter through a museum that covers POW's from all the wars. In fact I saw a larger that life size cut out picture of the husband of a very good friend who was a POW during Vietnam. The pictue was taken at some press release from the prison camp. He was a navy Flyer. Once outside you can either walk or drive around the whole prison site. They have signs along the driving route that tells a great deal about the area you are looking at, if you choose not to walk. I walked through the cemetery, the headstones are mostly stone to stone. I guess they ran out of pine for coffins or could not keep up with the deaths, and started buring soldiers shoulder to shoulder because they had about 100 deaths aday. Some were spaced apart, those were the soldiers buried with coffins. There were six graves set apart from the others, these six were prisoners that formed a gang that would rob and beat the other prisoners. They robbed them of their personnel possessions and sometimes beat other to death. Someone alerted the officials at the prison and these six were tried and hanged. Others of this gang were located and were made to run through a gauntlet of prisoners. The six and well as the others were located by the officials saying they would withhold rations unless they were turned over. After this a group of prisoners were formed to police the camp to hopefully avoid this problem. Their was a stream that ran through the prison. This was used for drinking water. The only problem with that was when they built the stockade the pilings were into the ground and reduced the flow of the water. What was suppose to happen was at one end prisoners were to get their drinking water and the other was for human waste. But since the stockade wall was blocking alot of the flow of the stream it caused the waste not to flow through and out of the the stockade. This waste backed up and contaminated all the drinking water. The ground around the stream became very marshy, the water itself was full of contaminates. Soldiers got dysintery and other diseases. There were two rows of stockade fencing. They called it the inner and outer stockade. On the inner they had what they called the deadline. If a prisoner crossed the deadline they were shot. In the movie we saw at the museum they told of a soldier reaching for a piece of bread that a guard had dropped inside the deadline, this soldier was killed. Different states have errected monuments throughout the camp area in the memory of those who died. In the beginning wooden markers were placed at the graves with numbers on them. The union enlisted a aid of a prisoner to keep a hospital record. This prisoner was Dorence Atwater from NY he was chosen because of his penmanship. What Dorence did was keep two records making every effort to identify every prisoner. When he left the prison in 1865 he secreted the second set of records in his personel ariticles. Without his second record I doubt anyone would be able to search today for who was buried there. Dorence and Clara Barton went back to the cemetery with help and erected wooden markeres with the names and units inplace of the numbered markeres that were originally errected. My saddest thing while walking through the headstones was seeing the stones marked unknown. There are about 400 of them throughout the cemetery. Sorry if I rambled, but when I came home and pulled my email, all 152 messages, yesterday and found someone mentioning Andersonville I had to respond to that right away. I bought two books on Andersonville, I thought I had bought the list of soldiers buried there but I must have set it down and forgot to pick it up. When I got home I didn't have the one book I most wanted. To sort of give you a feeling of what the place is like; my VERY active seven year old daughter was quiet and respectful while we were there. Sharon