Located twenty-seven miles northeast of Montgomery on the banks of the Tallapoosa River, Talisi, or Tallassee, was a major Creek Indian village before forced removal to Oklahoma in 1836. In January 1844, Thomas M. Barnett and William M. Marks had a small dam built beside the falls on the Tallapoosa River and diverted water to power a small textile mill, with construction done by enslaved laborers using stones gathered from the river bed. In 1864, as the Civil War weakened the South and Richmond, Virginia, became more vulnerable to Union attack, Colonel Josiah Gorgas, chief of the Confederate Ordnance Bureau, sought to move the Richmond Carbine factory to a safer location. Tallassee seemed to meet his needs because of its remoteness and the river's power, so he sent Lieutenant Colonel James A. Burton, superintendent of armories, and Captain C. P. Boles to determine whether the gun works could be relocated there. The 1844 stone structure was leased from Benjamin Micou for manufacture of a new .58 caliber muzzle-loading carbine, a weapon recommended by General Robert E. Lee and tested and modified by Major General J.E.B. Stuart. During June, July, and August 1864, metalworking machinery, gunsmiths, and blacksmiths arrived in Tallassee and production began. By the spring of 1865, five hundred carbines had been produced, but as Wilson's Raiders under Union General James H. Wilson moved into west Alabama and destroyed the arsenal at Selma, Confederate Major W. V. Taylor, superintendent of operations at the armory, was ordered to load all machinery and the five hundred Tallassee carbines into wagons and haul them to Cowles Ferry for rail shipment to Macon, Georgia. The fate of those five hundred rifles has long been debated, and none were ever used in battle. Only about a dozen Tallassee carbines are known to exist, and the Tallassee armory was the only armory not destroyed during the war.