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Page 5The bodies of those who died of small-pox are buried in an old field about thirty rods northeast of the pest-house. There are sixty-four graves, a large proportion of them being of members of Tennessee regiments. The white head-boards show that the first death from this disease took place March 12, 1864, within a month after the occupation of the stockade, and the last on July 19, 1864. The graves will be enclosed in a little cemetery five rods square. The troops on duty here were, as I have already indicated, the 1st, 2d, 3d, and 4th Georgia Reserves. They occupied There were but two storehouses. They are close by the depot, one on either side the railroad track. The quarter-masters' building is thirty by one hundred and five feet in size, and eight feet high in the eaves; the commissary building is of the same height, and forty-five by two hundred and sixty feet in size. It can very readily be seen that the Rebels were utterly unable to keep a week's full rations on hand, even when the stockade contained no more than twenty thousand prisoners. These buildings now furnish a temporary home for various persons, and contain the freight rooms, a shoemaker's shop, a groggery, and the commissary supplies for the negroes at work in the cemetery. The forts are nine in number. The largest is at the southwestern corner of the stockade. It mounted twelve guns, had three magazines, and enclosed the house and yard of the Widow Turner. At the southeastern corner is a double fort, or perhaps I should say two single forts, one fronting south and the other fronting east, and each mounting three guns. Midway on the eastern side, not far from the wall, is a small fort mounting three guns; and far out in front of that, on the hill, the beginning of a larger one, which never was finished, though two guns were mounted there. At the northeastern corner is a fort of five guns, and another of the same size is at the northwestern corner, while between the two is a smaller one of three guns. On the western side is a long line of rifle-pits, and a square fort of five guns. Here, then, were forty-one guns, so mounted that nearly every acre of The head-quarters of Captain Wirz were at first in the house already mentioned as near the railroad above the village. They were afterwards in the log-house of the Widow Turner, enclosed in the large fort. It has two rooms and is now a gaping skeleton. Finally they were in a large frame building erected for that purpose over in the village, not far from the church. A piazza has recently been added to it, and it is now occupied by a white family. In the northern part of the slope on which the village is built are springs whose outflow forms a little stream running off to the southeast. Just south of the village are other springs, which make a little stream flowing off to the northeast. These two form a junction in the marsh just west of the bake-house, and thence flow eastwardly through the stockade, giving a sluggish stream with an average depth of ten or twelve inches and a width of four or five feet. It appears much larger in the stockade, because the partial damming of it by the eastern wall gives it a back-flow. If I add that five thousand men would have found it scantily sufficient for their uses, the condition of thirty thousand men compelled to find it sufficient will be very readily apparent. "We had it pretty tough sometimes at Camp Chase," said a young fellow who had been a Rebel soldier, and with whom I talked at Fort Valley the other evening; "we had to tote our wood nigh onto half a mile in the winter time." Before I could answer, another young fellow, sitting on the opposite side of the fireplace, responded, "Well, s'pose you'd been in Andersonville, as my father was, where you did n't have to tote it at all; where you could see a thousand acres within a quarter of a mile, and was n't allowed to have a stick of it!" There seemed no occasion for me to speak to that point. Andersonville was a good place for the prison. There is plenty of wood and plenty of water, and the section is generally healthful. I have spoken of the water privilege that was occupied; the one that was rejected can be seen by the most unobservant tourist. The little stream that runs through the stockade forms a junction, half a mile or less from the eastern wall, with the Sweet Water Creek. On this creek, a short mile above this junction, a merciful man might have located the stockade. The site is as good as that chosen by Winder; the labor of preparing it would not have been materially greater; the end of it might have adjoined the railroad track; its gate could not have been over half a mile from the station; there would have been half a dozen springs; and, best of all, there would have been the fish-fruitful and rapidly flowing current of the Sweet Water, a stream at least twenty feet wide and sixteen inches deep. |
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