By the summer of 1864, thousands of Union prisoners were suffering from disease, hunger, overcrowding, and contaminated water at Andersonville prison in Georgia. The camp had become one of the most lethal places of the Civil War.
After a violent storm, fresh water began flowing from the ground in an area that became known as Providence Spring. Robert J. Morgan recounts why survivors regarded the event as an answer to prayer and how the spring became a lasting symbol of hope amid the horrors of Andersonville.
PHOTO: Former prisoners met at Providence Spring in 1897.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue here on our American stories. Ruger is the biggest gun manufacturer in the country, and it’s not by accident. In the words of William Ruger, each firearm is built quote to a standard, so I would want one even if it was made by our competitors. Here to tell this American story is Logan Metish. Logan is a firearms historian, a museum professional who runs High Caliber History LLC. Here’s Logan.00:00:41
Speaker 2: The timing really couldn’t have been better for William Ruger when he and Alexander Stern became business partners in January of nineteen forty nine. Ruger had been making hand tools for the previous few years, but unfortunately business was not going well for him. He found himself forty thousand dollars in debt and he was pretty much ready to close up shop when he showed Storm a prototype of something that he was working on, which harkened back to his earlier days with military arms development. So Sterm liked what he saw and agreed to bankroll the project with fifty thousand dollars in seed money, and just like that, those two men began laying the foundation for what would become one of the largest firearm companies in the United States. But in order to get there, you have to realize where they came from. So let’s start with William Ruger. His dad was a lawyer and his mother was from a family that owned a successful chain of department stores. As an interesting aside, his great grandfather was actually a drummer boy at the Battle of Waterloo in eighteen fifteen. Anyway, so Bill Ruger had always been interested in firearms and tinkering with designs, and very mechanically inclined. In fact, he patented his first machine gun when he was just sixteen years old, with the help of his aunt, who had set him up with a college fund. He ended up going to the University of North Carolina, where he continued to work on arms designs, specifically a blow forward style machine gun. While he was in college, he met a girl named Mary Thompson. She was from a well healed family there in North Carolina, and they got married in nineteen thirty eight. Bill was just finishing up his sophomore year of college, but when he got married, he quit and the two of them promptly took off for a three month long European honeymoon. Once back in the States, Bill continued to work on developing different firearms designs, and one of the things he started to do was tinker with existing design. He took a Savage Model ninety nine lever action rifle and converted it into a gas operated, self loading repeating rifle, and rightly so, he was pretty darn proud of his work. So he took it to New York City and demonstrated it to the executives at Savage and found himself rather baffled when they weren’t absolutely astounded with what he had done. You know, he was hoping they would buy the design and bring him on board as a designer and offer him a job, but that just wasn’t the case. So Bill found himself with a young wife, a newborn son, Bill Junior, an empty inheritance coffer, and no job. So he went back down to North Carolina, and as luck would have it, he ended up getting a telegram that offered him a job at Springfield Armory in Springfield, Massachusetts for thirty two dollars and fifty cents a week. He was really not something he was in a position to pass up, so he took the job, but he didn’t stay there for terribly long. He ended up quitting in the spring of nineteen forty. He quit because he didn’t want to end up like John Garrand, who he felt was treated like a mechanical toy and was paid what he felt to be a mediocre salary for all of his contributions, which is really saying something, because John Garrand is, of course one of the greatest arms designers of the twentieth century, and you and I and anyone else in the gun world would consider it an honor to end up like John Garrand, but not Bill Ruger. That was not good enough for him. He aspired to hire things. So he went and continued refocusing his efforts on his machine gun designs, and he pitched the idea to Smith and Wesson. They turned him down, but they did offer him a job. They saw his his potential as a designer, and Smith and Wesson offered him a job for seventy five dollars a week, which was a nice pay bomp, obviously, but Bill’s pride kind of got in the way and he rejected it, and on down the road he went to another gun company, this time High Standard. They weren’t interested, but they told him again to head on down the road and try his luck with Auto Ordinance. So Bill went over to Auto Ordinance, and a little while later they ended up hiring him as an arms designer, and his pay was somewhere around one hundred dollars a week. So he took that job around the beginning of World War Two, and he stayed on as an arms designer for them until the end of the war in nineteen forty five. By nineteen forty six, Bill had gone into business for himself. He always wanted to be self employed and have the freedom to do his own thing and design his own stuff, and so that’s exactly what he did with the Ruger Corporation. They were making hand tools and small industrial parts, and also he was working on his design for a twenty two caliber pistol. But unfortunately, like I’d mentioned earlier on, business wasn’t doing so well. The whole hand tool concept was a good idea, but it was proving too pricey for the market. So by nineteen forty nine Bill was basically flat broke when he met Alexander Stern. Now Storm was an interesting guy. He was a legacy Yale graduate and like Bill was from a well to do family and was always sporting custom tailored clothes and taking weekend trips to New York City, and while the rest of his Yale classmates ate at the cafeteria on campus, he dined at the finest restaurants in the hotels in the local area. He was kind of a renaissance man. He dabbled in a little bit of everything, including writing, acting, painting, filmmaking, and he was also a big time collector of all sorts of different things, one of which just happened to be firearms. Adding to the oddity that is the life of Alexander Sturn. This well bred young man served during World War Two with the Office of Strategic Services, which was the forerunner of sorts for today’s CIA. So with that fifty thousand dollars worth of seed money, they started their company, and their first factory, and I used that term loosely, was in a small, unassuming building that they affectionately dubbed the Red Barn, across the street from a railroad depot in Southport, Connecticut. It was essentially just Bill and alex and a couple of tool makers, all working long, long hours into the night, and Bill actually mentioned at one point he was writing the final payroll check from the initial fifty thousand dollars and they were out of cash, and he told Alex, he said, this is the last bit of money for the original film, fifty thousand dollars investment. But that was okay because they had designed this pistol together, and Alex Stern had checks for one hundred guns that were ready to be sent out into the mail, and so just like that, they were in business. The seed money paid off. Now, this gun that they designed together was inspired by World War Two handguns from the Axis Powers. It had a similar silhouette appearance of both the Japanese Namboo and the German Luger. In certain ways, the ergonomics of those guns were tweaked a little bit to create what would become known as the Ruger standard, and the gun would go on to be lauded by shooters for generations as being well balanced, easy to hold, and easy to shoot. Unfortunately, the gun is a bit of a Rubik’s cube in design when it comes to putting the gun back together.
Speaker 1: And we continue here on our American stories. Ruger is the biggest gun manufacturer in the country, and it’s not by accident. In the words of William Ruger, each firearm is built quote to a standard, so I would want one even if it was made by our competitors. Here to tell this American story is Logan Metish. Logan is a firearms historian, a museum professional who runs High Caliber History LLC. Here’s Logan.00:00:41
Speaker 2: The timing really couldn’t have been better for William Ruger when he and Alexander Stern became business partners in January of nineteen forty nine. Ruger had been making hand tools for the previous few years, but unfortunately business was not going well for him. He found himself forty thousand dollars in debt and he was pretty much ready to close up shop when he showed Storm a prototype of something that he was working on, which harkened back to his earlier days with military arms development. So Sterm liked what he saw and agreed to bankroll the project with fifty thousand dollars in seed money, and just like that, those two men began laying the foundation for what would become one of the largest firearm companies in the United States. But in order to get there, you have to realize where they came from. So let’s start with William Ruger. His dad was a lawyer and his mother was from a family that owned a successful chain of department stores. As an interesting aside, his great grandfather was actually a drummer boy at the Battle of Waterloo in eighteen fifteen. Anyway, so Bill Ruger had always been interested in firearms and tinkering with designs, and very mechanically inclined. In fact, he patented his first machine gun when he was just sixteen years old, with the help of his aunt, who had set him up with a college fund. He ended up going to the University of North Carolina, where he continued to work on arms designs, specifically a blow forward style machine gun. While he was in college, he met a girl named Mary Thompson. She was from a well healed family there in North Carolina, and they got married in nineteen thirty eight. Bill was just finishing up his sophomore year of college, but when he got married, he quit and the two of them promptly took off for a three month long European honeymoon. Once back in the States, Bill continued to work on developing different firearms designs, and one of the things he started to do was tinker with existing design. He took a Savage Model ninety nine lever action rifle and converted it into a gas operated, self loading repeating rifle, and rightly so, he was pretty darn proud of his work. So he took it to New York City and demonstrated it to the executives at Savage and found himself rather baffled when they weren’t absolutely astounded with what he had done. You know, he was hoping they would buy the design and bring him on board as a designer and offer him a job, but that just wasn’t the case. So Bill found himself with a young wife, a newborn son, Bill Junior, an empty inheritance coffer, and no job. So he went back down to North Carolina, and as luck would have it, he ended up getting a telegram that offered him a job at Springfield Armory in Springfield, Massachusetts for thirty two dollars and fifty cents a week. He was really not something he was in a position to pass up, so he took the job, but he didn’t stay there for terribly long. He ended up quitting in the spring of nineteen forty. He quit because he didn’t want to end up like John Garrand, who he felt was treated like a mechanical toy and was paid what he felt to be a mediocre salary for all of his contributions, which is really saying something, because John Garrand is, of course one of the greatest arms designers of the twentieth century, and you and I and anyone else in the gun world would consider it an honor to end up like John Garrand, but not Bill Ruger. That was not good enough for him. He aspired to hire things. So he went and continued refocusing his efforts on his machine gun designs, and he pitched the idea to Smith and Wesson. They turned him down, but they did offer him a job. They saw his his potential as a designer, and Smith and Wesson offered him a job for seventy five dollars a week, which was a nice pay bomp, obviously, but Bill’s pride kind of got in the way and he rejected it, and on down the road he went to another gun company, this time High Standard. They weren’t interested, but they told him again to head on down the road and try his luck with Auto Ordinance. So Bill went over to Auto Ordinance, and a little while later they ended up hiring him as an arms designer, and his pay was somewhere around one hundred dollars a week. So he took that job around the beginning of World War Two, and he stayed on as an arms designer for them until the end of the war in nineteen forty five. By nineteen forty six, Bill had gone into business for himself. He always wanted to be self employed and have the freedom to do his own thing and design his own stuff, and so that’s exactly what he did with the Ruger Corporation. They were making hand tools and small industrial parts, and also he was working on his design for a twenty two caliber pistol. But unfortunately, like I’d mentioned earlier on, business wasn’t doing so well. The whole hand tool concept was a good idea, but it was proving too pricey for the market. So by nineteen forty nine Bill was basically flat broke when he met Alexander Stern. Now Storm was an interesting guy. He was a legacy Yale graduate and like Bill was from a well to do family and was always sporting custom tailored clothes and taking weekend trips to New York City, and while the rest of his Yale classmates ate at the cafeteria on campus, he dined at the finest restaurants in the hotels in the local area. He was kind of a renaissance man. He dabbled in a little bit of everything, including writing, acting, painting, filmmaking, and he was also a big time collector of all sorts of different things, one of which just happened to be firearms. Adding to the oddity that is the life of Alexander Sturn. This well bred young man served during World War Two with the Office of Strategic Services, which was the forerunner of sorts for today’s CIA. So with that fifty thousand dollars worth of seed money, they started their company, and their first factory, and I used that term loosely, was in a small, unassuming building that they affectionately dubbed the Red Barn, across the street from a railroad depot in Southport, Connecticut. It was essentially just Bill and alex and a couple of tool makers, all working long, long hours into the night, and Bill actually mentioned at one point he was writing the final payroll check from the initial fifty thousand dollars and they were out of cash, and he told Alex, he said, this is the last bit of money for the original film, fifty thousand dollars investment. But that was okay because they had designed this pistol together, and Alex Stern had checks for one hundred guns that were ready to be sent out into the mail, and so just like that, they were in business. The seed money paid off. Now, this gun that they designed together was inspired by World War Two handguns from the Axis Powers. It had a similar silhouette appearance of both the Japanese Namboo and the German Luger. In certain ways, the ergonomics of those guns were tweaked a little bit to create what would become known as the Ruger standard, and the gun would go on to be lauded by shooters for generations as being well balanced, easy to hold, and easy to shoot. Unfortunately, the gun is a bit of a Rubik’s cube in design when it comes to putting the gun back together.
00:08:56
Speaker 1: And when we come back, we’ll continue with the story of Ruger, the Great American Company, and my goodness, how it got started. It is like how so many companies got started. I’m the cheap and almost out of business from the beginning. More of the story of Ruger, the Great American gun company. After these messages, this is our American stories.
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