On our way to Charleston, we decided on a slight route change and headed to Andersonville, Georgia.
The Confederate POW camp at Andersonville in Georgia is one of the civil war topics that I’ve read quite a bit about. I’ve never really looked at modern images of the site, so I really had no expectations on what would be there. Quite familiar with the limited images, photos and drawing, from the 1860s, I knew the log palisade enclosure would not have withstood the ravages of time.
C. W. Reynolds, Ninety-second Illinois Infantry , a former “star boarder at Andersonville,” wrote years later : “I was a prisoner of war in that place during the whole summer of ’64, and I well remember seeing a photographer with his camera in one of the sentinel-boxes near the south gate during July or August, trying to take a picture of the interior of the prison. I have often wondered in later years what success this photographer had and why the public had never had an opportunity to see a genuine photograph of Andersonville Prison.”
Today, Camp Sumter’s site is an open, mostly grass covered area. With my previous interest in Andersonville, the name the prisoners gave the camp – the adjacent town of Andersonville was named Anderson at the time – I found the contour of the open land quite familiar. The log palisades are long gone, though sections are today replicated with treated logs that will endure far longer than the originals.
Unfortunately, I had forgotten to reset my camera from manual exposure when I took pictures of the replica prisoner tents, the dead-line and the wall. I’ve managed to salvage the results and render them to a vintage look.
