Samuel Griswold and his wife Louisa moved from Burlington, Connecticut, to Clinton, Georgia, in 1815, and over the following decades he rose from store clerk and tinsmith to owner of cotton gin, foundry, wagon, and buggy works between Clinton and Macon. He employed slaves, freed slaves, and whites, and by 1860 had shifted most of his operations to the area that became Griswoldville to use the railroad for shipping, adding a gristmill, a steam-engine-powered sawmill, and a new cotton gin factory. In 1862, with partner Arvin Gunnison, he converted the gin works to make six-shot percussion revolvers for the Confederacy, creating the largest producer of handguns in the Confederacy; patterned after the Navy Colt, these weapons became known as the Griswold & Gunnison revolver. During the war, Griswold also added a hospital, a castor oil factory, and a furniture factory that made hospital beds and coffins. In July 1864, during General Sherman's cavalry operations south and east of Atlanta, Colonel Horace Capron's troopers attacked toward Griswoldville, destroying track and burning railcars, but finding the town too well defended to enter, they sent a captured locomotive backward into town, where it struck the rear of a passenger train, split a wooden car in half, and derailed others. Griswoldville survived that raid, and the pistol works continued until late November 1864, when the town was burned and the factories destroyed except for a few homes and the depot; Griswold's three-story mansion, used as a hospital and as quarters for invading and defending generals, later accidentally burned in 1907. More than 3,500 Griswold & Gunnison revolvers were produced there before the factory was destroyed on 20 November 1864, and Griswoldville also made 804 of the 10,000 pikes commissioned by Governor Joseph E. Brown for the Georgia militia's State Line Reserve Militia, later called Joe Brown's Pets.