SAVANNAH, Ga. – In just three years of field work, researchers have turned up more than 600 artifacts — from suspender buckles to railroad spikes – at the site of a Civil War prison camp in Southeast Georgia that remained virtually undisturbed since it was abandoned in 1864.
And that’s only scratching the surface.
Students and faculty from Georgia Southern University have plans this summer to dig deeper at Camp Lawton, a sprawling prison where the Confederate army once held more than 10,000 captured Union soldiers. But first they’re using cellphone chargers and a veterinarian’s X-ray machine to help with the painstaking work of cleaning and preserving items already uncovered.
“It’s an incredible amount of material they’ve recovered so far, but I really do think it’s just scratching the surface,” said Lance Greene, an anthropology professor at the Statesboro campus who’s overseeing students’ work at Camp Lawton. “We think starting in the summer we’ll have a lot more artifacts coming into the lab.”
Opened in October 1864 near Millen, 50 miles south of Augusta, Camp Lawton was built to replace the infamously hellish and overcrowded Confederate prison camp at Andersonville. The new camp sprawled over 42 acres, roughly a quarter-mile on each side, yet it became a largely forgotten footnote in Civil War history. That’s because Camp Lawton lasted just six weeks before its Confederate officers emptied the prison and fled to avoid the advancing army of Union Gen. William T. Sherman.