Andersonville National Historic Site

Andersonville, Georgia was the site of probably the worst of the civil war prisons--it was built to house captured Union soldiers during the war between the Northern and Southern states in 1864. It was overcrowded to four times its capacity, had no sanitary water supply, had no housing, had little food available and very unsanitary conditions. Of the approx. 45,000 Union prisoners that were held there during the war, nearly 13,000 died--not from battle wounds, but from scurvy, diarrhea and dysentery. The commander of the prison, Captain Wirz, was tried and executed after the war for war crimes committed at the prison.  It's now an historic site, and contains a replica of the prison gates that all the prisoners would walk through when they arrived there, memorials from each of the Northern states in memory of those Union soldiers who died there (& Wisconsins' monument was the first we saw), a museum dedicated to all POW's from all of the wars, and the National Cemetery where the 13,000 men who died at the prison were buried. At the time there were only sticks marking the graves, but one of the clerks in Captain Wirz's headquarters felt it only right to record who was buried there so that families could find their loved ones after the war.  The Captain disagreed, but the clerk secretly recorded the name and location of each of the men as they were buried, & after the war the headstones were made and placed over the graves.