Andersonville
You may remember a story that I told a while back about my great-great grandfather being buried in a Confederate cemetary in Elmira, New York. Today, my nephew asked to be taken to a Union cemetary in Andersonville, Georgia. I took him and his mom to Andersonville today, while my mom stayed in Thomaston to assist a friend to and from an appointment for outpatient hand surgery. Andersonville is an ultra small community of 305 people. The downtown area is just one street, two blocks long with old wooden storefronts on each side. When we got out of the car, the only sound that you could hear was the sound of the wind blowing. There was no one else walking the streets. It was like a scene from “Children of the Corn” or something. You know; when tourists stop in a quaint little town, having no idea that something awful is about to happen ! It did not even occur to me that today was Friday the 13th. My sister in law remarked that I should feel fortunate that I don’t live here. She did not see the local resident sitting just a few feet away from us, smoking a cigarette. The resident was a somewhat large, 40ish woman with long black hair, who seemed a little resentful of my relative’s comment. Despite her annoyance, she initiated a conversation with us and informed us that she was the curator of the Civil War Museum behind the storefront across the street. I could tell that her accent was not from Georgia; it turned out that she was a Civil War buff from Louisiana.(sp?) We promised to visit her museum after getting a quick bite at the one local eatery. In front of the eatery were about half a dozen men that I did not like the looks of. They were in their thirties and were wearing hard-hats even though there was no construction going on anywhere. They had been staring us down from the moment that we entered town. As I walked up the the restaurant, I said, ” hello everybody!” and ushered my family inside the doors to the inside seating. My seat was facing toward the window and Diane and Jay’s seats were facing away from it. In the middle of eating our sandwiches, three of the men outside started wrestling with each other in an almost homo-erotic sort of way. They were hugging each other and violently swinging each other around in an attempt to force each other to the ground. Fortunately the wrestlers and the spectators were smiling and laughing, insinuating that they were horseing around rather than seriously trying to fight. They disbursed and departed a couple of minutes after this apparent ethnological, ritual dance began. I didn’t tell my lunch companions about it until it was over. I later found out that these guys were lumberjacks.
Andersonville has a small Civil War museum with eight different Union soldier uniforms, fitted onto manekins. Also in this museum are three or four Confederate uniforms and a couple of womens’ dresses, all on manekins. Included under the display cases are guns, knives, medical supplies and other utensils from the era. The curator of the museum mentioned that many ghostbusters come to Andersonville to collect evidence of the existence of ghosts. She also mentioned in an offhand way that we humans are bundles of energy and that that is all we are. I did not take the bait and ask her to elaborate on this belief. This was not a belief that I expected to come from the mouth of a person that lived in a town of 305 people.
On the other side of town is a prisoner of war museum with a partial recreation of the prison camp for Union soldiers. The camp was 26 acres in size, with wooden walls on the perimeter, but with no roof on the facility. The prisoners had to make their own crude lean-tos to live under with whatever tree branches and tent fragments they could scrape up. 29% of the prisoners died at this camp. The man in charge of the camp, a Mr. Wirtz, was tried and convicted of a war crime after the war. He was hanged for his mismanagement of the camp. One leaves the camp with the belief that war is bad.
Photos to hopefully follow,
I.C.