The Miracle of Providence Spring

He's been providing for us long before we were even born.

I’d like to think that I take a Chestertonian view of travel. In his 1922 book What I Saw in America, he says that “Travel ought to combine amusement with instruction; but most travelers are so much amused that they refuse to be instructed.” Amusement and instruction – what a great combination! Our family vacations frequently combine an historical quest with typical recreational activities like swimming and hiking.

The most amusing and informative adventure our family has enjoyed was a trip to follow the Civil War service of my great-great grandfather, Joseph Renchen. In the course of learning more about our family history, I acquired his Civil War service record from the National Archives. 

Joseph Renchen enlisted in the Kentucky 4th Mounted Infantry (Union) at the beginning of the Civil War. His service lasted the entire war, and he was discharged from a hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. During the course of the war, he endured sickness, a wound to the shoulder, and imprisonment for nine months in one of the harshest prison camps of the War between the States. I knew that this ancestor was one I wanted to get to know better.

I decided to take my children on a trip to retrace Renchen’s service during the Civil War. As my children and I began our travels, we saw both the natural beauty and the poverty of Lewis County, where Renchen was born, enlisted, died, and was buried. His burial monument stands tall, and many of his children and their descendants are buried nearby. Winding our way south, we imagined what it was like to take the journey by foot or by horse – camping in fields and foraging food, not sure some days where the next night might be spent.

As Chesterton points out in the collection of essays Come to Think of It, “the American Civil War was a real war between two civilizations. It will affect the whole history of the world. There were great and good men, on both sides, who knew it would affect the whole history of the world.” As I surveyed the battlefields, and visited the cemeteries, I saw the graves of countless men on both sides of the war who, like most of today’s soldiers, were not “fight[ing] because he hated what was in front of them, but because he loved what was behind him.”

Our travels took us through Kentucky and into Tennessee, to Nashville National Cemetery, where his brother, Francis Renchen, was buried after succumbing to illness like many in the Civil War. The sight of these monuments is a valuable lesson that war is not just an abstract idea, but it comes at very real and great cost.

Chesterton knew this cost well – his only brother Cecil served in World War I, and after having been injured several times, he died of nephritis in a hospital in France and is buried in the northeast of France at Terlincthun British Cemetery.

As we continued our travels into the heart of the South, our anticipation of our final destination – Andersonville National Park – gathered as the humidity increased. One battlefield after another, up mountains and down them, we pressed on. The minor inconveniences of our travels were nothing in the context of the difficult journey we knew our ancestor and his fellow soldiers forged.

Finally, we made our way to the prison camp at Andersonville. Stark and austere, it has been maintained largely the way it was when my ancestor and 40,000 others were confined there. Captured during the ill-fated Stoneman-McCook raid, Joseph Renchen spent nine months in squalid conditions, fighting for his life amidst dysentery, limited food rations, and putrid water.

As we surveyed the park, I noticed a small well-house, with the inscription Providence Spring. We discovered that to this day, water from this spring continues to flow out of a small spigot into a reservoir. While there is a sign today warning visitors not to drink the water, the truth is that countless more Andersonville prisoners would have died if this wonderfully clean water had not miraculously appeared.

The way the National Park relays the story, the “sudden appearance of the spring at the western wall of the stockade in the summer of 1864 was a treasured memory of many Union survivors of the prison.” In contrast, the way survivors recount it, the spring was the result of fervent prayer by men of many faiths and a direct answer to those prayers.

On August 14th, 1864, after weeks of intense rain, a lightning bolt struck the rock under the  stockade surrounding the prison, and a spring burst forth which supplied prisoners with fresh drinking water for the duration of their imprisonment. While it is true that the spring did “suddenly appear,” this miracle of God’s Providence was much more than a “treasured memory,” – it was the reason that many of these men survived the war at all. 

Warning signs notwithstanding, it was a delight to drink this water that saved my ancestor with my children! Were it not for the miracle of this spring, and the Providence that wrought it, we would likely not even exist. God had a lesson for my children and me that day – he’s been providing for us long before we were even born.