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Georgia archaeologists find Confederate POW camp
Georgia archaeologists find Confederate POW camp
By RUSS BYNUM Associated Press Writer The Associated Press
Wednesday, August 18, 2010 7:15 PM EDT
SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — Preserved for nearly 150 years, perhaps by its own obscurity, a short-lived Confederate prison camp began yielding treasures from the Civil War almost as soon as archeologists began searching for it in southeastern Georgia.
They found a corroded bronze buckle used to fasten tourniquets during amputations, a makeshift tobacco pipe with teeth marks in the stem, and a picture frame folded and kept after the daguerreotype it held was lost.
Georgia officials say the discoveries, announced Wednesday, were made by a 36-year-old graduate student at Georgia Southern University who set out to find Camp Lawton for his thesis project in archaeology.
He stunned experienced pros by not only pinpointing the site, but also unearthing rare artifacts from a prison camp known as little more than a historical footnote on the path of Gen. William T. Sherman's devasting march from Atlanta to Savannah.
"What makes Camp Lawton so unique is it's one of those little frozen moments in time, and you don't get those very often," said Dave Crass, Georgia's state archaeologist. "Most professional archaeologists who ever thought about Camp Lawton came to the implicit conclusion that, because people weren't there very long, there wouldn't be much to find."
Camp Lawton imprisoned more than 10,000 Union troops after it opened in October 1864 to replace the infamously hellish war prison at Andersonville. But it lasted barely six weeks before Sherman's army arrived in November and burned it.
The camp's brief existence made it a low priority among scholars. While known to be in or near Magnolia Springs State Park outside Millen, 50 miles south of Augusta, the camp's exact location was never verified.
That task last year fell to Georgia Southern student Kevin Chapman. The state Department of Natural Resources offered Chapman a chance to pursue his master's thesis by searching the park grounds for evidence of the 15-foot pine posts that formed Camp Lawton's stockade walls.
The work started in December. By February, Chapman, his professor and about a dozen other students had dug up stains in the dirt left by rotting wood and forming a straight line — remnants of the stockade wall.
About 1/4 mile away, on adjacent land owned by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, they used a metal detector to find something else: a pre-Civil War penny about the size of a half-dollar. They were surprised nobody had beaten them to it.
"We thought, holy cow, in order for us to find an artifact like this, this site has to be undisturbed," Chapman said. "To find a Civil War site that hasn't been looted is extremely rare."
Other artifacts soon followed. The tourniquet buckle was stamped with the name of a New York company that manufactured surgical equipment in the 1860s. The clay pipe bore the name of its maker in Glasgow, Scotland.
There was a literal half-penny — a coin cut in half to buy things costing less than 1 cent — and three other coins including a German-made game token stamped with George Washington's profile.
"It illustrates a lot about the life of the prisoners," said John Derden, a history professor at East Georgia College who spent years researching Camp Lawton for an upcoming book. "The significance of Camp Lawton is it really presents in microcosm almost every aspect of the Civil War POW experience, both good and bad."
"Of course, Andersonville was a hellhole and is more important. But Andersonville is pretty archaeologically sterile."
In 1864, the Andersonville camp in southwest Georgia was overcrowded with more than 30,000 war prisoners. Thousands died from a lack of food and medicine.
The Confederate army built Camp Lawton to handle the masses Andersonville couldn't. It sprawled over 42 acres — about 1/4 mile on each side, nearly twice Andersonville's size.
Confederate Gen. John H. Winder noted Camp Lawton could easily hold at least 32,000 prisoners. "It is, I presume, the largest prison in the world," he wrote.
Prisoners arriving in October 1864 had no living quarters. They built crude huts with scraps of pine left over from construction of the stockade. Records show that Camp Lawton held 10,229 Union troops by early November. Despite the camp's brief existence, at least 685 prisoners died there.
Derden's research uncovered personal accounts by Camp Lawton's prisoners recounting how they set up a black market to sell tools and molasses candy, killed alligators for food and bribed doctors for passage on trains carrying away the sick.
Chapman and the professor overseeing his work, Sue Moore, say they've excavated just a tiny fraction of the camp's interior.
"People say, 'How long are you going to keep doing this?'" Moore said. "A short answer is years and years, because there is so much we hope to discover there."
Original Article can be found at:
http://www.charter.net/news/read.php?id=16493893&ps=1018&cat=&cps=0&lang=en
© 2010 Charter. All Rights Reserved
By RUSS BYNUM Associated Press Writer The Associated Press
Wednesday, August 18, 2010 7:15 PM EDT
SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — Preserved for nearly 150 years, perhaps by its own obscurity, a short-lived Confederate prison camp began yielding treasures from the Civil War almost as soon as archeologists began searching for it in southeastern Georgia.
They found a corroded bronze buckle used to fasten tourniquets during amputations, a makeshift tobacco pipe with teeth marks in the stem, and a picture frame folded and kept after the daguerreotype it held was lost.
Georgia officials say the discoveries, announced Wednesday, were made by a 36-year-old graduate student at Georgia Southern University who set out to find Camp Lawton for his thesis project in archaeology.
He stunned experienced pros by not only pinpointing the site, but also unearthing rare artifacts from a prison camp known as little more than a historical footnote on the path of Gen. William T. Sherman's devasting march from Atlanta to Savannah.
"What makes Camp Lawton so unique is it's one of those little frozen moments in time, and you don't get those very often," said Dave Crass, Georgia's state archaeologist. "Most professional archaeologists who ever thought about Camp Lawton came to the implicit conclusion that, because people weren't there very long, there wouldn't be much to find."
Camp Lawton imprisoned more than 10,000 Union troops after it opened in October 1864 to replace the infamously hellish war prison at Andersonville. But it lasted barely six weeks before Sherman's army arrived in November and burned it.
The camp's brief existence made it a low priority among scholars. While known to be in or near Magnolia Springs State Park outside Millen, 50 miles south of Augusta, the camp's exact location was never verified.
That task last year fell to Georgia Southern student Kevin Chapman. The state Department of Natural Resources offered Chapman a chance to pursue his master's thesis by searching the park grounds for evidence of the 15-foot pine posts that formed Camp Lawton's stockade walls.
The work started in December. By February, Chapman, his professor and about a dozen other students had dug up stains in the dirt left by rotting wood and forming a straight line — remnants of the stockade wall.
About 1/4 mile away, on adjacent land owned by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, they used a metal detector to find something else: a pre-Civil War penny about the size of a half-dollar. They were surprised nobody had beaten them to it.
"We thought, holy cow, in order for us to find an artifact like this, this site has to be undisturbed," Chapman said. "To find a Civil War site that hasn't been looted is extremely rare."
Other artifacts soon followed. The tourniquet buckle was stamped with the name of a New York company that manufactured surgical equipment in the 1860s. The clay pipe bore the name of its maker in Glasgow, Scotland.
There was a literal half-penny — a coin cut in half to buy things costing less than 1 cent — and three other coins including a German-made game token stamped with George Washington's profile.
"It illustrates a lot about the life of the prisoners," said John Derden, a history professor at East Georgia College who spent years researching Camp Lawton for an upcoming book. "The significance of Camp Lawton is it really presents in microcosm almost every aspect of the Civil War POW experience, both good and bad."
"Of course, Andersonville was a hellhole and is more important. But Andersonville is pretty archaeologically sterile."
In 1864, the Andersonville camp in southwest Georgia was overcrowded with more than 30,000 war prisoners. Thousands died from a lack of food and medicine.
The Confederate army built Camp Lawton to handle the masses Andersonville couldn't. It sprawled over 42 acres — about 1/4 mile on each side, nearly twice Andersonville's size.
Confederate Gen. John H. Winder noted Camp Lawton could easily hold at least 32,000 prisoners. "It is, I presume, the largest prison in the world," he wrote.
Prisoners arriving in October 1864 had no living quarters. They built crude huts with scraps of pine left over from construction of the stockade. Records show that Camp Lawton held 10,229 Union troops by early November. Despite the camp's brief existence, at least 685 prisoners died there.
Derden's research uncovered personal accounts by Camp Lawton's prisoners recounting how they set up a black market to sell tools and molasses candy, killed alligators for food and bribed doctors for passage on trains carrying away the sick.
Chapman and the professor overseeing his work, Sue Moore, say they've excavated just a tiny fraction of the camp's interior.
"People say, 'How long are you going to keep doing this?'" Moore said. "A short answer is years and years, because there is so much we hope to discover there."
Original Article can be found at:
http://www.charter.net/news/read.php?id=16493893&ps=1018&cat=&cps=0&lang=en
© 2010 Charter. All Rights Reserved
That's fascinating! Please do keep us updated on this adventure. You probably already know this but satellite photos taken over the Sahara show a major waterway that ran from the Nile across the Sahara to the Atlantic. I don't know or remember any dates on when this river or waterway was in existence.
Yeah! I seem to be having one of those days too! LOL, Gee I could spend all day listening to anything on this topic! I luvs it!
this kind of thing...not this kind of this. How many times do I have to double post before I can actually nail what I want to say in a single post without screwing up, today? LOL. seems to be the theme of the day for me...
Oh, sorry, the reason I mentioned my original major was that this kind of this is fascinating to me, lol. Brainfart.
I was an archaeology major when I first went to college; that's what I received my scholarships for, actually, but switched later to English.
My dad's program at the University he works for actually worked for awhile on reconstructing a ship from the "bones" of a ship found in the middle of the desert in Egypt...apparently the ship was being transported from one body of water to the other, but the interesting thing is it was clearly designed for trans-oceanic travel. My dad's program was involved in building a model, scaling it up, building it, and putting it to the test in the Mediterranean..and it stayed afloat :). They're planning to sail it from Africa to South America sometime next year.
My dad's program at the University he works for actually worked for awhile on reconstructing a ship from the "bones" of a ship found in the middle of the desert in Egypt...apparently the ship was being transported from one body of water to the other, but the interesting thing is it was clearly designed for trans-oceanic travel. My dad's program was involved in building a model, scaling it up, building it, and putting it to the test in the Mediterranean..and it stayed afloat :). They're planning to sail it from Africa to South America sometime next year.
I'd love to see the Egyptian pyramids as well. I've seen some in Mexico and climbed one but it's been a while. I had good knees then! But isn't it interesting that so many diverse cultures were building pyramids during the same period. Mayans, Aztec, Egyptian and I believe there are some in the Orient. (I'd need a refresher course on that one!).
I also saw on the History Channel that scientific analysis was done on the hair of some royal mummies. Interestingly, cocaine and cannabis were both found in the hair. Both are plants of the Western Hemisphere and nowhere else to our present knowledge. There had to be some communication between the two cultures. I wonder what else science will come up with to tie these hemispheres together???
I also saw on the History Channel that scientific analysis was done on the hair of some royal mummies. Interestingly, cocaine and cannabis were both found in the hair. Both are plants of the Western Hemisphere and nowhere else to our present knowledge. There had to be some communication between the two cultures. I wonder what else science will come up with to tie these hemispheres together???
I find stuff like this so amazing! I am totally fascinated by it all. I recently went thru Georgia on my way north with my sis. She took me up this mountain and there were tepees and all kinds of Indian relics and I was totally in awe of it! Hopefully before I die I will get to see a pyramid. My biggest dream! Wow, this is so cool!
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