The Gun Foundry

This building was built in 1861 to cast cannons for the Confederate government. Richmond became the capital of the Confederacy in part because it could produce arms, clothing, paper, and other essentials for the Confederate government, army, and navy. Before the Civil War, Tredegar had produced cannons, ordnance, and other iron products for the U.S. Army and Navy, and after Virginia seceded that effort was applied to Confederate contracts. Joseph Reid Anderson, the head of Tredegar, was given control of coal mines near Richmond and blast furnaces in western Virginia to maintain his flow of raw materials. He also reopened the Virginia Manufactory of Arms building, a state armory built between 1798 and 1810 for arms making. Another nearby arms production facility was the Confederate laboratory on Brown’s Island, where white women loaded cartridges for small arms; an explosion there killed thirty women in 1863. The twelve-pound howitzer gun here was cast in the Tredegar Foundry on 7 January 1862 and was designated gun number 1432. The Civil War gun foundry had two large exterior air furnaces operating on a single stack, where coal and iron were loaded, heat from the burning coal was carried over the iron by the air draft to melt it, and the molten iron was then tapped on the interior side of the wall and flowed down a trough into molds in the floor of the foundry.

Richmond, Virginia · United States