We headed to middle Georgia with some friends for a weekend pilgrimage, today’s main stop was at Andersonville and the National Prisoner of War museum.

During the last year of the Civil War, the Confederate army built a 16 acre stockade and in it the housed up to 33,000 prisoners – with no buildings. They were just penned in, building lean-tos and digging what were, essentially, their own graves.

It’s a powerful place and the recreated main gate (above) gives a much more bucolic feel than Union soldiers would have experienced.

The only source of water was a stream that ran through the stockade, but it didn’t have much flow and was contaminated.

Adjacent to the prison is the museum and national cemetery, where some of the 13,000 prisoners who died at Andersonville are buried.

That evening, we headed to Americus for dinner and walked the downtown area, mostly closed by 5 p.m. on a Saturday.