Andersonville Road Trip

When given the opportunity to take students on the road, I never pass it up.  Teaching on-site is a true passion of mine because I often feel constrained by the four walls of my classroom.  Getting students out there to walk where history happened allows them to have a much more personal connection to the subject.

Several years ago I began taking students up to the Andersonville National Historic Site in southwestern Georgia.  We do a mock trial beforehand in which students recreate the war crimes trial against Captain Henry Wirz who was the commander of the infamous prison camp.  We cap it off with the six hour road trip to visit the site for the weekend.  It is an optional trip for students and their families.

Rather than giving just your standard run of the mill tour, I always have both the students and parents actively engaged in activities while we are there.

While at the site, I give each student their own bag of items which represents the items that they would be bringing into Andersonville if they had actually been a prisoner.  Items include things like beef jerky, an orange, scissors, money, canteen of water, candles, peanuts and various other items.  When we enter the reconstructed front gate, students are then allowed to look at their items to determine how or why the particular items would be valuable to survival.  What is usually interesting is that students often begin to exchange items with each other.  Since we have already studied Andersonville, students usually pick up on the fact that their items would probably not have lasted very long since "fresh fish" were often attacked and robbed.  This is an activity that could easily be done in the classroom as well.

At designated sites on the tour we also read diary entries from survivors describing the conditions of the camp.  Some describe the horrors of the prison while others show aspects of daily life.  This year my creativity was inspired by a trip to Michaels and I bought each student a small bottle to gather up a sample from Providence Spring.  In August 1864, an intense storm approached the stockade and a single bolt of lightning slammed into the ground just inside of the prison, opening up a natural spring which provided some much needed fresh drinking water. The sudden appearance of this spring most likely saved hundreds if not thousands of lives. For years after the war ended, survivors would go to Providence Spring and drink from it saying it provided good health and good luck. Students were excited to have their own sample to take home.

Arguing the case to parents

Our trip also provided students with the opportunity to show off their debating skills to their parents.  When we got to the location where Wirz's office was, students were split into their prosecution/defense teams they had during the mock trial and were given a few minutes to argue their case for or against Captain Wirz in front of the parents who drove up.  This year, it was quite a lively debate with a majority of the parents saying Wirz was guilty.

At the end of our tour we visited the cemetery in which the 13,000 victims are buried.  The week before, I printed off a list of the victims and hung it up to give students a visual representation of what 13,000 actually looked like.  Each student then selected a name and wrote a remembrance card and put together a bouquet of flowers for the soldier.  When we visited the cemetery each student took their own tribute plus another classmates and placed it on the designated grave.  This is one of those things that could have been either a great success or an epic failure due to not being able to find the proper graves.  Luckily it was a huge success because my students said it made the whole experience much more personal since they felt more connected to the buried soldier.

In addition to visiting Andersonville, we also toured the Habitat for Humanity Global Village where they learned about the organization and visited mock ups of homes that they build throughout the world.  We ended the weekend by attending a Sunday school class taught by President Carter which  is a whole other blog post.  All in all this years trip was a huge success and students came in this morning still buzzing about what a good time they had.  I had a wonderful time too, but man am I exhausted.

President Carter post coming soon!