Andersonville National Historic Site
During the Civil War this quiet stretch of southwest Georgia was Camp Sumter, the Confederacy's largest and deadliest prison, where nearly 13,000 Union soldiers perished from disease, starvation, and exposure in barely fourteen months. The dead were laid shoulder to shoulder in trench graves that now form the orderly white rows of Andersonville National Cemetery. Today visitors report cries of agony and the faint moans of starving men drifting across the open fields, especially when fog settles over the old stockade ground at dusk. Dim figures are said to wander the earthworks where prisoners once huddled, and motorists along Highway 49 have described a robed figure near the cemetery thought to be Father Peter Whelan, the Confederate chaplain who ministered to the dying. The anguished spirit of commandant Captain Henry Wirz, hanged for the camp's horrors, is the most often reported, said to pace the road into the prison he could not escape in death.
📍 496 Cemetery Road, Andersonville, GA 31711, Andersonville, GA · Get directions