Providence Spring is one of the small but powerful stops on the loop through the prison grounds. After a thunderstorm in August 1864, a spring of fresh water broke through the ground inside the stockade — to prisoners who had been dying of dysentery from contaminated water, the event seemed miraculous. Survivors raised money for the small marble-and-brick pavilion that now covers the spring, dedicated in 1901.
The pavilion sits low on the slope inside the reconstructed stockade outline. The water still trickles into a small basin and out into the creek below. Stand here for a minute, read the inscription, and you have one of the more concrete reminders that the people who died at Andersonville were not statistics. They were soldiers who prayed for clean water and remembered when they got some.