By the summer of 1864, Camp Sumter at Andersonville had become a death factory. Designed for 10,000 prisoners, it held over 30,000, and men were dying at a rate of more than 100 per day from dysentery, scurvy, and exposure. Confederate authorities needed another prison, fast. They chose a site beside the Augusta and Savannah Railroad, five miles north of Millen Junction in Burke County, where a natural spring fed a creek through dense longleaf pine forest. Construction crews -- many of them enslaved laborers -- built a massive wooden stockade modeled on Andersonville but far larger, enclosing 42 acres to Andersonville's 26. The compound was designed for 40,000 men. They named it Camp Lawton, after Confederate Quartermaster General Alexander Lawton.

Camp Lawton opened in October 1864, and prisoners began arriving by rail from Andersonville and other facilities. Within weeks, more than 10,000 Union soldiers filled the stockade. Conditions, while initially better than Andersonville's hellscape, deteriorated quickly. The spring-fed creek that was supposed to provide fresh water ran through the center of the camp, but with thousands of men upstream, the water downstream became fouled. Rations were meager -- cornmeal and occasionally rancid bacon. The prisoners built crude shelters from pine boughs and whatever scraps they could scavenge. By November, 725 men had died and were buried in two adjacent cemeteries. Then, on November 22, word reached the camp that Sherman's army was marching from Atlanta toward the sea. Confederate guards evacuated the prisoners by rail, and within days the stockade stood empty. Camp Lawton had existed for barely six weeks.

Sneden was no ordinary prisoner. Allowed outside the stockade on parole to help the camp doctor write prescriptions in Latin, he surveyed the grounds with a cartographer's eye, sketching the layout of walls, guard towers, and earthen fortifications. After the war, back in New York, he turned his field sketches into detailed watercolors -- part of what would become the largest collection of Civil War soldier art ever produced, totaling roughly 1,000 watercolors, sketches, and maps. The collection vanished into a rented storage bin near Tucson, Arizona, until the Virginia Historical Society acquired it decades later. In 2009, researchers from the Lamar Institute used ground-penetrating radar to search the grounds of what had become Magnolia Springs State Park. The following summer, Georgia Southern University archaeologists, guided by Sneden's paintings, began digging. They found the stockade walls and around 200 artifacts left behind by the prisoners themselves.

The archaeological significance of Camp Lawton lies in how suddenly it was abandoned. When Sherman's advance forced the evacuation, there was no time for the systematic cleanup that erased most Civil War prison sites. Artifacts remained exactly where prisoners dropped them -- buttons, utensils, fragments of daily survival frozen in the sandy Georgia soil. By 2011, archaeologists had excavated less than one percent of the 42-acre site, yet the finds were already rewriting assumptions about prisoner life. The earthen fort that once guarded the stockade is still visible within Magnolia Springs State Park, and the crystalline spring that gave the park its name -- the same spring that once provided drinking water to ten thousand desperate men -- still flows at nine million gallons per day. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and excavation continues as each summer season peels back another layer of a prison the Confederacy built to last years but used for barely a month and a half.