Guess What #6

This Guess What was shot last winter. An exercise in finding beauty where most people would only see ugliness.

The previous Guess What should have been called “Guess Where” I suppose…

For those of you who know Civil War history, it should have been easy to guess the location because of the prominent sign “Deadline” in the foreground. The photo is at the site of the stockade of Andersonville, a Confederate prison at Camp Sumter, Southwest Georgia, now a national historic site. Various states (such as Rhode Island, pictured in Guess What #5) have erected monuments to their soldiers who suffered and died in the horrific conditions here. Almost 13,000 Union soldiers died at Andersonville in the 14 months of its existence.

The word “deadline” referred to the boundary of the prison camp. Any prisoner who crossed that line was shot dead.

There’s an excellent and very moving POW museum at Andersonville, which points out that Andersonville was not the only place where prisoners starved and died during the Civil War. Such as Johnson Island in Sandusky Bay, just a few miles from where I grew up.

The cemetery at Andersonville is a very sobering place as well.

Like the Vietnam memorial in Washington DC, its impact comes from the visual shock of seeing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of names of the dead.