East Coast Trip: Day 4

Last night we spent the night in Montgomery, and this morning we made our way to the capital building.  The first things that I noticed were how white all of the buildings were, and that there were no skyscrapers.  It was so strange being in a downtown area without skyscrapers.  The capitol’s architecture reminded me of a bit of the White House.  At the back of the capital was a semi-circle with each of the fifty state’s flags and a rectangle of stone with the states names engraved upon them. Here are a few of my favorites.

 The inside of the capital was absolutely exquisite!  The first things you see when you walk in, are two spiral stair cases on either side of the room leading up to a second and third story.  If you walk forward a few steps you will see the rotunda and looking up you see a peach dome with ornate gold sculpture work and a beautiful stain glass circle in the middle.

After visiting Montgomery we headed over the Georgia/Alabama border and headed over to Andersonville. The drive there was SOOO pretty. There were trees everywhere, thick and tall and incredibly straight. It was rather odd because they were 20-30 feet tall and only the last 9-15 feet had branches and leaves. It makes for a great scenic drive.

We finally arrived at Andersonville Prison. When I arrived my first thought was that this place was way too pretty to have such a dark past. Then, as we did the driving tour I was reminded of the horrors that went on in that place.  Andersonville was a prison that was built at the beginning of the Civil War by the Confederate army to hold the Union solders.  Both sides believed that the war wouldn’t last long, so neither side went to great extent building areas to hold their POWs.  Andersonville was originally made for only about 8,000 prisoners but because of the vast numbers of prisoners and the small number of prisons they had around 35,000 prisoners at that facility. Between this and the Union army blowing up train tracks and main roads it made it impossible to get supplies to the prisoners, and the little supplies they did get where quickly used up. Because of this, the mortality rate at Andersonville was higher than that of any other POW camp in the Civil war. There where pictures of some of the men from the prison and it literally looked like someone stretched skin colored Saran Wrap over a skeleton. The moralities can be seen at their fullest at the Andersonville National Cemetery. The graves have a name, rank, state of birth, and number in order of who died. It really was sobering.

After Andersonville, we drove for about two and a half hours to Atlanta, Georgia where we got sufficiently lost trying to find the hotel. Instead we found that the Atlanta roads look like a toddler took a crayon a scribbled them in. It is really crazy down here, but I’m loving that southern hospitality.