To the left is the trailer for our new documentary, The Prison and The Copperhead: The Story of the Rock Island Civil War Prison. The winter of 1863-64 was very cold in the Midwest, temperatures reaching as low as 32 degrees below zero Fahrenheit at Rock Island. During December of 1863, about 5000 Confederate prisoners were brought on dreadfully long train rides to a new, and ill-prepared, prison camp on Rock Island. Over the following twenty months the camp housed over 12,000 prisoners of war from the South of whom almost 2,000 would perish there.A severe winter and a cholera epidemic caused hundreds of prisoner deaths in its first months. However, its overall death rate was much lower than the rate at Andersonville. Special emphasis in the documentary will be placed on how the Rock Island Prison got its undeserved reputation as, "The Andersonville of the North."      Heritage Documentaries, Inc. has received initial funding to begin the production of a 27-minute video documentary on DVD that will tell the story of the Rock Island Confederate prison. It will highlight the reasons for the choice of this location for the camp, the lack of adequate facilities when the first prisoners arrived, the eventual development of facilities, the administration of the camp, the establishment of the cemetery, and the closing of the camp and dispersal of prisoners.