Fayetteville Arsenal

The Carolinas Campaign began on February 1, 1865, when Union Gen. William T. Sherman led his army north from Savannah, Georgia, after the “March to the Sea,” aiming to join Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia against Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. As scattered Confederate forces consolidated in North Carolina, Sherman defeated Gen. Joseph E. Johnston's last-ditch attack at Bentonville, and after being reinforced at Goldsboro late in March, Johnston surrendered on April 26, essentially ending the Civil War. On March 11, 1865, Sherman entered Fayetteville and made the arsenal his headquarters while reporting to Washington on the campaign's progress. Believing the United States should never again entrust such valuable property to people who had betrayed a trust, he ordered his chief engineer, Col. Orlando M. Poe, to destroy the arsenal. Poe assigned the work to the 1st Michigan Engineers and Mechanics, who on March 12 began smashing the machinery with sledgehammers and axes, then knocked down the brick walls with railroad irons hung by chains from wooden tripods, and on March 14 set the rubble and lumber on fire as Sherman moved his headquarters across the Cape Fear River. The arsenal grounds remained vacant until the government auctioned the land in 1873. The U.S. Arsenal at Fayetteville had been built between 1838 and 1853, though it lacked equipment until 1857. Before the federal government could use it, the Civil War began, North Carolina seceded, and local militiamen occupied the site. In June 1861 the state transferred control to the Confederacy, and workers converted 36,000 flintlock muskets to percussion-cap weapons, installed machinery captured at Harper's Ferry in present-day West Virginia, produced about 10,000 rifles, assembled a few pistol carbines, and made its greatest contribution through the assembly of more than 900,000 rounds of small arms ammunition, signal rockets, and friction primers by women workers.

Fayetteville, North Carolina · United States