Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Four score...

A recent foggy morning lent a pensive attitude to the prison site and national cemetery. 

Today is the 150th anniversary of The Gettysburg Address. Just think, the war still had a year and a half to go and this prison was not even yet built.

Looking south toward some monuments, barely visible left of center.



The fence encloses a large hole in the ground that could be the site of a well that was dug by prisoners, or it could be the beginning of a tunnel, but it dates to the time of the prison. The tree has grown up since the prison closed; the entire prison site was barren of vegetation.



Looking toward the Ohio and Michigan monuments.



On the quarter mile road between the prison site and the cemetery.



The Georgia monument at the entrance to the cemetery, a memorial to all American prisoners of war. This memorial was the last to be placed at Andersonville, dedicated by Governor Jimmy Carter, in 1976.

 
Iowa remembers its dead.








Watch the video Ranger Chris Barr made for this historic anniversary.
 
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Thought of the day:


Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. 

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. 

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. (Abraham Lincoln)