Grave Work - What the Dog Knows - page 162

“Thomasville, once simply the end of the railroad line in Georgia, has always been a well-
kept secret because of its remote location,” a Road & Travel magazine article observed. But
to the fabulously wealthy industrialists who flocked there after the Civil War—the Vander-
bilts, the Goodyears, and the Hannas—it was no secret at all. They all bought plantations and
mansions at fire-sale prices. Cotton plantations became game-bird-shooting plantations after
Reconstruction. By 1887, Harper's magazine had named Thomasville one of the top winter
health resorts on three continents, with its salubrious dry air and increasing wealth.
“Northern beef and good fresh milk can be had here,” the Harper 's feature noted. After the
encomiums, the writer offered a caution: “The popularity of this place makes it important for
visitors to see that its sanitary arrangements keep pace with its growth.”
Indeed. Two decades before, Thomasville's sanitary arrangements hadn't kept pace with
its sudden growth. In the last throes of the Civil War, a panicked Confederacy, anticipating
General Sherman's advance through North Georgia, shipped five thousand Union prisoners
from the notorious Andersonville prison camp to Thomasville. Slaves in the small town hast-
ily dug long trenches, six to eight feet deep and ten to twelve feet wide, to define a five-acre
spot in the piney woods. The phalanx of Andersonville prisoners, ill, starving, and near death,
were put in that hastily built camp prison.
The prisoners lived—and reportedly five hundred died—in Thomasville during twelve
days in December 1864. The deaths were mostly from smallpox and diarrhea, and the num-
bers might have been higher if it hadn't been for the relative kindness of the locals. Physicians
who already lived there and tended to the wealthy set up a temporary hospital in the nearby
Methodist church.
Then the nervous Confederacy, realizing that Sherman had taken Savannah just two hun-
dred miles to the east, moved the prisoners out of Thomasville. Those who survived arrived
back in Andersonville on Christmas Eve.
The prison camp barely registers as a blip in the history of Thomasville or the Civil War.
Though the federal government made the most sustained effort in the history of the country
to disinter, identify, and reinter Union soldiers in federal cemeteries, it missed Thomasville.
As Civil War historian J. David Hacker noted, “Men went missing; battle, hospital and pris-
on reports were incomplete and inaccurate; dead men were buried unidentified; and family
members were forced to infer the fate of a loved one from his failure to return home after the
war.”
The lot on Wolfe Street is tiny. Less than an acre of the original five-acre prison is still un-
developed, a patch of scrubby barren grass and a few pines and deciduous trees, surrounded
by houses and city buildings. Two sides of the four-sided ditch survive, now L-shaped and
sloping. A small historical marker notes the spot's significance, but the marker is dark and
the lot shaded. I could find only one obscure guidebook that included its presence. That's in