Andersonville, Georgia

You know you’re in the Deep South when a doublewide is upscale living, and every road has cotton instead of litter alongside. This is just past the picking season, so we assume that the ground cover of white puffs is coming from the trucks that transport this incredible stuff from field to gin or from gin to processing plants. We stopped at one point and gathered some of it to send home to our niece and nephew, who probably thought we were crazy for sending them a plastic bag full of this stuff.

But I recall as a kid being transported by the sight of such a rare treasure – cotton as it was picked off the plant! I hope they were as excited as I was when my aunt sent me some.

The beauty of traveling with your computer and a mobile connector is the that we have the ability to immediately find answers to those silly questions that pop up as we go along. Like who was Oglethorpe? (Answer: English general, founder of Georgia.) And as we were entering Plains, GA, where was the peanut hero, George Washington Carver, born? Plains? No, Diamond, Missouri. And then, since it was there on the web page for us to read, a little more about Carver, expanding on what we had learned back in grade school, and impressing us with his accomplishments even more because now we’re adults and can appreciate how hard he must have worked. Did you know, for instance, that his father died before he was born, and he and his mother were kidnapped by slave raiders when he was only an infant? He was returned to the plantation without his mother and never saw her again. And this little slave boy turned out to be the first African-American professor in a southern university. Amazing, and that was only a beginning for him.

As we head up the road towards Atlanta, we’ll be stopping in Andersonville, home of the infamous Civil War prison, our own little Dachau for Northern Soldiers. I expect to be equally enthralled and appalled. The only thing I know about it has to do with the book by MacKinlay Kantor that I never read, and the TV special that I did see back in the 60’s.
Now, finally, I’m about to be educated.

Later: Sad, what man does to man. Below, some of the state monuments that dot the original prison area, a remnant of stockade that has survived, and some of the rudimentary tents created out of sticks, clothing and found objects.

Betty