During the subsequent years the writer has given the foregoing account in lectures and conversations to his comrades of the Grand Army of the Republic and to many others. Gentlemen of scientific and Christian attainments have said that this explanation of the phenomenon of Providence Spring is the most satisfactory of any that they have heard.
The event here chronicled is commemorated by the erection on the spot of a granite pavilion which is appropriately named “Providence Spring.” The inscriptions are as follows:
This Fountain Erected by
The National Association of Union
Ex-Prisoners of War
In Memory of the 52,345 Comrades
who were confined here as prisoners of
war, and of
the 13,900 comrades buried in the
adjoining National Cemetery.
Dedicated Memorial Day,
May Thirteenth, Nineteen Hundred
and One.
James Atwell, National Commander.
S. M. Long, Adjt. Gen’l.
J. D. Walker, Cham. Ex. Committee.
A reverse tablet bears the words:
This Pavilion Was Erected by the
Woman’s Relief Corps
Auxiliary to the Grand Army of the
Republic
In grateful memory of the men who
suffered and died in the
Confederate Prison at Andersonville,
Georgia,
From February, 1864, to April, 1865.
| “The prisoner’s cry of thirst rang up to heaven; God heard, and with his thunder cleft the earth And poured his sweetest waters gushing here.” |
“Erected 1901.”