Join us at the CAST Senior Center every Tuesday afternoon for our free virtual programs! Everyone is welcome to attend, and no preregistration is required. Presented by the Senior Learning Network. Andersonville National Historic Site began as a stockade built about 18 months before the end of the U.S. Civil War to hold Union Army prisoners captured by Confederate soldiers. Located deep behind Confederate lines, the 26.5-acre Camp Sumter (named for the south Georgia county it occupied) was designed for a maximum of 10,000 prisoners. At its most crowded, it held more than 32,000 men, many of them wounded and starving, in horrific conditions with rampant disease, contaminated water, and only minimal shelter from the blazing sun and the chilling winter rain. In the prison's 14 months of existence, some 45,000 Union prisoners arrived here; of those, 12,920 died and were buried in a cemetery created just outside the prison walls. Andersonville is the deadliest ground of the Civil War. The program will begin with a general overview of Civil War prison statistics and why Andersonville was chosen as a location for a prison site. We will then talk through the of Andersonville using modern photos of the prison and photos from 1860. The program will cover living conditions inside the prison, the experience of prison guards, and the efforts to preserve the site after the Civil War.