We packed up and left early Saturday morning as we knew we had a long drive ahead of us, we planned to make two extensive stops, and we, on a time zone change, would lose an hour.
Our first stop was Plains Georgia, the birth place and current home of President Jimmy Carter.
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| Jimmy's boyhood home. |
We toured his boyhood farm where Jimmy worked in the fields tending to his daddy's peanut and other crops. The demonstrations, complete with Jimmy's narration, told of his many toils in the field including his first experience of plowing with a mule.
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| Peanut fields |
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| The family shower. A pipe to a bucket with holes in it. |
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| Cotton fields |
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| The blacksmith shed where a smith was working that day. Jimmy's father is said to have enjoyed forging the farm's tools. |
We then drove into the village of Plains which is very small.
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| Plains railroad station which was campaign headquarters. |
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| Main street Plains, and that's about it. |
The Carter Museum in Plains is Jimmy's old high school and includes many contributions from his classmates and other townspeople.
We than drove on to Andersonville just 20 miles away. This is the site of the famous Confederate prison where up to 45,000 Union soldiers were held as prisoners of war. Over 14,000 of those prisoners died in captivity most due to disease brought about by the wretched conditions of confinement and lack of food and medical care. The prison was a stockade around an open field in which the prisoners built crude tents to shelter themselves from the intense sun and heat of the south's summer. The field sloped down to a little creek which was supposed to serve as a source of freshwater on the upper side and a sewer on the lower edges of the creek. However, the stream's capacity could not serve the needs of the thousands of soldiers who ended up confined there and conditions quickly deteriorated into a situation where over a hundred soldiers died per day, near the end of the prison's history.
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| The monument to all prisoners of war. |
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| A replica of the stockage showing the "deadline" where prisoners would be shot if they entered that area. |
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| Typical of the crude tents constructed for relief from the hot sun. |
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| The area showing the slope to the creek, the edge of the stockade, the deadline posts marked in white. |
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The nearby cemetery. Trenches were dug and soldiers were laid shoulder to shoulder. Fortunately records were kept of locations and Clara Barton and others worked to place the grave markers after the war's end.
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A bipolar day. A tribute to a man of peace and a tribute to those that did not survive the horrors of war.
