I recently talked with the National Park Service ranger on duty at Andersonville Prison to verify facts of my story. This miracle during the Civil War saved the lives of more than 30,000 Union prisoners.

Andersonville Prison was deliberately built around a small swamp. The stockade enclosed 16 acres. It grew to 26 &½ acres as trainloads of Union prisoners arrived. Records indicate at least 49,485 of our soldiers were herded together there with more than 32,000 of them together at one time during August of 1864.

Do the math. Those men lived like chickens in a pen; just barely enough space for each person to lay down to sleep at night; a space only seven feet long by four feet wide fFDXor each man with no place to walk. The ground was bare dirt and there was no shelter from 100 plus degree summer days and freezing winter nights.

  The Confederates gave them nothing to help. The blankets they had when captured were all they had for shelter.The men were starved to death literally. Many old photos exist showing prisoners looking like Nazi prisoners; terribly ugly skin and bones. They had no doctor or medicine at all. More than 13,000 men died of disease there.

Disease was their biggest problem.The stockade was not only built around a small swamp, the prison staff and their horses, hogs, and chickens lived along the stream just outside the stockade on the north side, just before the little stream entered the prison.

Rain carried the body wastes of all the animals and the Confederate humans in to the Union prisoners as their only drinking water. All lived with miserable intestinal problems. Many died horrible deaths of disease.

"Upstream (outside the prison, at the camps where the guards and animals stayed) the small creek was used for dumping trash, for bathing, for disposing of human and animal waste and for other unclean uses.

This creek then went a few hundred meters downstream into Andersonville Prison where the prisoners were forced to drink this dirty water and catch countless diseases that caused the prisoners to suffer."

Conditions were so bad and deliberately made to cause deathly disease that the Confederate prison commander, Capt. Henry Wirz, became the only Confederate officer tried and hanged for war crimes.

So what was the large scale miracle that saved so many men? Well, in August of 1864, a "great number of the prisoners" gathered together under the very hot sun, kneeling against each other, and prayed to the Heavenly Father of Jesus for rain (they prayed often). The larger-than-usual number asked not only for rain to cool them and raise the stream level which made the water a little better to drink, they also asked this time for an answer to their water needs.

Many times before they had received rain after praying. This time they received a thunderstorm which did not move in from somewhere else. It appeared in a clear sky right over them and became very strong. They received the rain they asked for. They also received a monster lightning bolt which struck the ground.

The rain was an answer to prayer, a miracle.

That the lightning missed the men was the second miracle that day.

The third miracle was the new spring of cool, clean water that appeared at the spot the lightning hit.

The spring still flows today , it is now called Providence Spring

I received an email recently pointing out a few facts I did not include in this web page. I researched the things he said in his email and he was right. So in all fairnes, I think I should point out a few things I left out of my web page and I apologize for not knowing these things when I created it. It is true that Andersonville Prison, officially known as Ft. Sumter, was the largest and most infamous prison camp of the Civil War. But what I didn't know was that the Confederate soldiers were also starving, as was most of the South at that time. What provisions they had they used to take care of their own soldiers first. And the reason for the overcrowding at the prison was that the U.S. government had discontinued their policy of trading prisoners, often right on the field of battle. So all Confederate and Union Prisoners were being held until the war's end, creating terrible overcrowding conditions at most prisons in both the North and South. The conditions at most Union Camps were just as deplorable as the ones in the South, but not as well known because since the North won the war the facts about their prison camps were kept hidden and omitted from many history books. The most infamous Union prison camp was Camp Douglas in Illinois, along the shores of Lake Michigan. The first prisoners arrived in February 1862. Conditions were unbelievably horrendous and it is reported that 1 in 5 prisoners within those walls died. Punishment by officials and guards was unusually cruel. Confederate soldiers starved to death as food rations were withheld and many, being deprived of blankets while living in tents, froze to death in the severe weather."Prisoners were deprived of clothing to discourage escapes. Many wore sacks with head and arm holes cut out; few had underwear. Blankets to offset the bitter northern winter were confiscated from the few that had them. The weakest froze to death. The Chicago winter of 1864 was devastating, the loss of 1,091 lives in only four months was the heaviest for any like period in the camp's history, and equaled the deaths at the highest rate of Andersonville from February to May, 1864. Six thousand Confederate prisoners died there,from 1863-1865. Yet it is the name of Andersonville that burns in infamy, while most Americans have never even heard of Camp Douglas."Again I apologize for not including this information in my Andersonville webpage.---Mary

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