King Cotton

Florida to Georgia, Alabama, and Knoxville (11/9 - 11/10):

We finished up our second loop with a tour of rural Georgia and Alabama. Based on the book Confederates in the Attic, the Civil War travelogue I bought a few days ago in North Carolina, we headed for Andersonville, GA. Andersonville was the site of the most notorious and deadly Confederate prison. Between 20 and 30% of the Union prisoners who entered the camp died from starvation or crazy disease. After the war, the prison's director Henry Wirz became the only person to have ever been convicted of war crimes in the US, and he was hanged. But...he has been turned into a martyr by pro-Confederate groups, who have celebrations for him every year. The establishment of Andersonville as a national historic site was so contentious that it had to be established as a general museum honoring American POWs to distract from the Civil War aspect. (Pro-Confederates say that Wirz was a scapegoat and Northern prisons were just as bad.)

The POW museum was pretty well-done if kind of disorganized. There were a lot of personal stories, plus exhibits about how POWs are actually defined. I would have liked the museum better though if it was somewhere else, as honoring POWs should kind of stand alone, and it distracted from all the terrible things that happened at Andersonville itself. (Also, if you really want to honor POWs, it seems like you could put the museum somewhere more accessible that rural southwest Georgia).

Post-Andersonville, we headed over windy, out-of-the-way highways to Enterprise, Alabama, which our atlas told us was home to a Boll Weevil Monument. We were pretty disappointed to get there and find out it was really just a small kind of generic fountain (you go to the trouble to put up a monument to the Boll Weevil and then make it normal-looking??). The story behind it is at least somewhat interesting, but the Wikipedia article itself would have sufficed.

The destinations of the last day of the road trip made up for the disappointment of the Boll Weevil. We saw a crazy amount of memorabilia at the Hank Williams Sr boyhood home in Georgiana, AL. In Montgomery we stopped off at the Rosa Parks museum (with the Outkast song as our driving soundtrack), which has this cool bus with videoscreens in the windows where you can watch a reenactment of the arrest and then look at exhibits about the following boycott of the bus system. Our final stop was the space center in Huntsville, where we paid our respects to Miss Baker, the first space monkey to return from orbit alive, by laying a banana on her grave.
-M