The bakery was located on the west side of the stockade, about equidistant
from either line of palisade. It was of rough boards, and but one story in
height. Its interior disclosed two rooms, one of which communicated with
the two ovens, which were built of common brick. These two ovens--fourteen
feet in length by seven feet in width, and with one kneading-trough
fifteen feet long, and less than three feet in width--supplied the
prisoners with all the bread they obtained; and so far the writer has not
learned that there was any other source of supply.
These same ovens, kept red hot, and worked night and day, to the fullest
capacity, by the commissary bakers of the United States service, could not
have produced but eight thousand rations of white bread, and but nine
thousand six hundred rations of corn bread. This is the extreme limit; and
regarded by the workmen, who have made the calculations, as almost an
impossibility. The ordinary capacity of this establishment was probably
about four or five thousand rations of corn bread. This quantity, divided
daily among thirty thousand men, would give but a small morsel to each
one; and this gives the appearance of truth to the statement, that from
two to six ounces of corn bread were furnished as rations to the
prisoners.
[Illustration]
Ask a survivor of this prison treatment, if perchance you can find one,
how he preserved his life, and he will tell you, "By eating the rations of
the dying." Ten thousand men were sick or dying in this enclosure at one
time.
After the carts, with their scanty burdens of food, had passed into the
prison, and distributed their contents, ten or fifteen thousand of the
haggard and starving men might be seen collected together in the central
portion of the prison trading with each other. Some of the poor
wretches would be offering a handful of peas for a knot of wood no
larger than the human fist, in order that they might cook their allowance;
others offering, in barter, their remnants of clothing--a cap, or a shoe,
or anything they possessed--for a morsel of food.
[Illustration: _PLAN OF PRISON BAKERY_ ANDERSONVILLE Ga.]
The little knots of wood above mentioned had a standard value of fifty
cents; yet there were immense forests all around, and within sight on
every side.