Andersonville Beans

Union Ex-Prisoners of War
Lackawanna County, 1886-1890

It was startling to find “Andersonville Beans” on the menu for a Union Ex-Prisoners of War Association banquet in 1889. Andersonville, the largest Confederate prison during the Civil War, was a nightmarish site in Georgia, where nearly a third of the prisoners died of starvation or disease. A quarter of a century later, this local veteran’s group in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania had the curious idea of naming a bean dish after the infamous place.

The tone of the annual reunion was distinctly different in 1889. For one thing, the speeches had a heavier emphasis on the prisons these men had survived—Andersonville, Libby, Salisbury, Danville, Florence, and Camp Sorghum (named by the prisoners after their rations of cornmeal and sorghum molasses, the main diet in the open-air prison in Columbia, South Carolina). Even the bill of fare for the banquet that year reflected prison food, one possible reference being the crab-apple sauce that accompanied the Fricasseed Chicken. Food was very scarce in the Confederate prisoner of war camps, reflecting wartime shortages throughout the South. Crabapples may have been among the foods that the prisoners were able to obtain on the black market from the guards.

The oldest of the four menus that survive from the association's banquets is dated 1886.  This dinner, marking their second annual reunion, was held at the Wyoming Hotel in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The menu features an engraving of a fashionable young woman on the front cover and the national association’s logo, a guard dog attacking a prisoner above the motto “Death Before Dishonor,” on the back. The lavish bill of fare employs an unusual convention, listing the time that each course would be served, starting at ten o'clock in the evening.



By 1888, the association had moved their annual event to the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad Dining Rooms, a more modest venue. The national logo is now shown on the front of the gray cover. The simpler fare printed on the pink interior reflects the humbler surroundings.



Below is the menu from 1889 with its many references to prison life. It would be fascinating to learn what the speaker Perry Fuller had to say about “Florence Prison, and what I know about making Corn Meal Dumplings.” Food was an integral part of these veterans' memory of their captivity during the war. Even so, naming one of the dishes after Andersonville was probably not the best idea.



The menu from 1890 shows that things went back to normal the following year. Andersonville Beans were renamed “Baked Beans with Vinegar onto ’em” and the Fricasseed Chicken was no longer accompanied with a crabapple sauce. There was more music on the program and fewer recollections of prison life. Nevertheless, the evening still ended with a toast to the memory of comrades who had crossed the “dead line”—the boundary that prisoners could cross only at risk of being shot.