Category: Visual Explorations

President Carter

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The primary reason for our trip this weekend was to see President Jimmy Carter, who still teaches Sunday School lessons at Marantha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia.

When we scheduled this trip, we didn’t catch that today was his 93rd birthday. Expecting large crowds, we were at the church a little after 5 a.m., the lesson didn’t start until 10 with a service afterwards at 11.

It was totally worth it. A colleague had told me she felt this was the best thing her family had done since they moved to Georgia five years ago.

She was underselling how powerful it was.

Andersonville

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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.