Sculpted by Gary Casteel
 
1863 Signed and Numbered Limited Edition Monument Replicas
 
During the 14 months of Camp Sumter’s existence, Union prisoners died at the Confederate prison near Andersonville, Georgia, at the rate of more than one an hour.  Known as Andersonville Prison, the facility ceased to exist at the end of the war, but what lived on was the controversy surrounding the almost 13,000 men who died from disease, exposure, and malnutrition in the filthy, crowded camp.  Having been asked by President Lincoln to ascertain the fate of missing Union soldiers so that their families could be notified, Clara Barton spent July and August of 1865 identifying and marking the graves of the dead.  She was assisted by Dorence Atwater, a former inmate of Andersonville whose prison duty had been to record the death of prisoners.
 
The prison site reverted to private ownership in 1875 and was purchased in 1890 by the Georgia chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans organization.  It was soon sold for $1 to the Women’s Relief Corps (WRC), a national auxiliary of the G.A.R.  The women set to work preserving and improving the site and hosting returning veterans.  They built a cottage on the grounds for the elected manager Lizabeth Turner to live in and to host returning veterans.  Turner had love and respect for the men in blue and devoted herself to honoring those who struggled and died at that site.
 
The women of the WRC vowed to protect the “wells they [prisoner] tried to dig with their own naked hands. . .and the spring the Lord opened with a thunderbolt in answer to their dying prayers.”  The trustees began protecting the site by placing a wire around it and iron gates for the entrance.  The WRC encouraged the veterans to erect monuments to honor and remember the men who struggled for survival there.  Beginning in 1899, monuments and memorials began to be placed to remember the men who suffered and died there.  On March 2, 1910, the Secretary of War authorized the army to accept the 88-acre site as a gift from the Woman’s Relief Corp and the Grand Army of the Republic.
 
In 1934, the Woman's Relief Corps erected a monument for the eight states that did not have a monument at Andersonville.  Known as the 8-State Monument, this simple and formidable monument was erected to memorialize those states that did not have a monument at Andersonville to represent and recognize their sacrifices.  States listed on the monument are Delaware, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, New Hampshire, Vermont, and West Virginia.
 
In 1970, the former Andersonville prison site and national cemetery was designated a national historic site; the next year it was taken over by the National Park Service.
 
This monument was dedicated on February 2, 1936 and is the most southerly in the first row of monuments located in the northwest corner of the former prison stockade.