Measuring just shy of 11-inches long, this wood gavel has a handle with slight swell in the middle and decorated with three red, white and blue painted bands near the head. The head is cylindrical, with a deep groove at either end and vertical grain striping with a varnished applied printed label reading:  “THIS GAVEL IS MADE OF GEORGIA PINE THAT / FORMED A PART OF THE STOCKADE AT ANDERSON-/ VILLE PRISON WHERE 12,926 UNION SOLDIERS DIED / DURING THE SHORT PERIOD OF ONE YEAR OF STAR-/ VATION NEGLECT AND WANT. THE MOST CRUEL /IN THE ANNALS OF THE WORLD’S HISTORY.”

Opened in February 1864 and expanded in June, the prisoner of war camp covered some 26-1/2 acres with a stockade 779 by 1,650 feet, resulting in about 30 square feet for each prisoner. Roughly 45,000 prisoners were confined there during the war, with a death rate of about 28% from food shortages, poor diet, living conditions and sanitation. CS Capt. Henry Wirz, camp commandant, was hanged after the war for war crimes. The area is now a national historic site encompassing a national cemetery with several state monuments commemorating their dead and a National Prisoner of War Museum. As mementos cut and carved from wood cut at historic locations, gavels were a popular souvenir, in part because of their use in veterans’ groups in calling meetings to order, etc.  In this case, it would have been an even more evocative artifact from the suffering it symbolized, if not from the verdict rendered on Wirz by a military tribunal. Postwar printed scenes of the camp sometimes carried the motto: “Let us forgive, but not forget.”   [sr][ph:L]

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