North to Magnolia Springs State Park

Wednesday, April 29, 2009
near Millen, GA

Because our drive today was planned to be a long one (220 miles... long for us), and because most of the planned route was on two-lane highways that weave through any small town along the way, we got an early start. By 9am, we had the bus running and on it's way to our next stop, Magnolia Springs State Park near Millen, GA.

Leaving the Swamp near Fargo, GA, we headed north to Waycross where we picked up US-1, which we took all the way to Swainsboro. I had to make a difficult right hand turn in downtown Swainsboro... tight roadways, intruding curbs, turning into a single lane between oncoming traffic waiting for the light on the left and parked cars on the right. I couldn't borrow much lane-space from anybody and couldn't avoid climbing a curb with my starboard-side drive-axle tires and, of course, the tires of the toad followed. Ouch! Both Dar and the fresh black tire-scar reminded me later of the wisdom of planning routes through tight commercial districts that minimize right hand turns. Lesson learned.

From Swainsboro it was east on US-80, then northeast on GA-23 to Millen, GA. Just 5 miles north of Millen is Magnolia Springs State Park. Most Georgia State Parks have sites that can accomodate big campers and they're generally well designed and maintained. Since it was the middle of the week didn't make reservations. But it's good we were flexible for the upcoming weekend as they were booked solid and we had to be out Friday. Two nights was about right anyway as there isn't a lot to see in this area anyway.

Magnolia Springs is a small State Park of only about 1,000 acres. It's the site of Camp Lawton, a Confederate POW camp during the Civil War. There's a small lake and a crystal-clear spring that flows at the rate of 9 million gallons per day. The pond near the spring was filled with hundreds of turtles, some quite large, and a bunch of other wildlife. We did spot a couple small alligators too.

We hiked around the park and found some earthworks that are the only remains of Camp Lawton. It was built to relieve crowding and the horrible conditions at Andersonville but was only in operation for less than a year before being abandoned in advance of Sherman as he marched from Atlanta to the ocean.

T