was done to help. Whelan arrived at Andersonville on June 16, 1864. While other priests and even the bishop would come for brief periods, Whelan alone remained for nearly four months during the hottest season of the year and the period of the highest mortality. He departed in October after many of the prisoners had been removed to other locations. Although the priest did not leave a record of the shock of his first entry into Andersonville, Father Hamilton described his impressions of subsequent visits vividly: I found the stockade extremely filthy; the men all huddled together and covered with vermin (lice).… I found [the hospital] almost as crowded as the stockade. The men were dying there very rapidly from scurvy…diarrhea and dysentery…They were not only covered with the ordinary vermin but also maggots…they had nothing under them at all except the ground. Into this nightmare came Whelan to begin a ministry unlike any that he had performed or would ever encounter again. After a restless night on his bunk in a little twelve-by-eight foot hut about a mile from the prison, he rose each day at dawn, took a scant breakfast and said his prayers. Then he walked the hot, dusty path to the stockade, where he stayed from 9 a.m. until nearly sundown; then it was back to the hut for night prayer and some food. He fell asleep exhausted and "full of sorrow for what he had seen all day." The stockade sloped down on both sides to a small stream about a yard wide and foot deep. Since no arrangement had been made for sewage disposal, this one creek had to provide drinking, cooking, and bathing water, while also serving as the latrine. Into the creek was thrown the waste of two nearby Confederate camps as well as the grease and garbage from the cookhouse. Soon the slow-flowing stream became a mass of thick, liquid pollution. As thousands more prisoners came and milled about its banks, some of the very sick were unable to extricate themselves from the mire; others who could not reach the "sinks," as they were called, had to relieve themselves in the mud. The creek soon became a new source of disease for the entire stockade. Father Whelan and his fellow priests had to exert an almost "superhuman effort" passing through this area in order to get from one side of the