Tredegar Iron Works operated from 1836 until 1952 and by 1860 was one of the nation’s largest and best-equipped ironworks, employing Richmond’s largest industrial workforce of about 800 free and enslaved laborers, a number surpassed by only three other ironworks in the United States. The James River and Kanawha Canal was vital to the site, powering water wheels, turbines, and other machinery and easing the transport of raw materials and finished goods. In 1848, Joseph Reid Anderson became owner of Tredegar Iron Works; as a civil engineer, industrialist, and soldier, he led one of the South’s largest foundries on the James River, producing steam locomotives, boilers, cables, naval hardware, and cannon. During the Civil War, using free and enslaved labor, Anderson supervised ordnance and munitions production through most of the war, and Tredegar produced more than half of the cannon used by the Confederacy, much of it cast in the 1861 gun foundry, making it a major source of munitions and ordnance for Confederate forces. More than 50 different buildings were constructed on the site over the years as older facilities were replaced according to operational needs. The pattern storage building was built around 1867 on the remains of a fire-damaged mill built in 1854; the earlier building produced flour until 1860 and then wood products during the first two years of the Civil War, while the later building stored patterns for casting guns, railroad wheels, and machinery. Other surviving structures include the company store, carpentry shop, and Civil War-era office building, and the upper level preserves sections of the original canal and industrial artifacts. After a devastating fire and declining demand for iron products, operations at the site ended in 1952. The property also displays a statue of Abraham Lincoln’s visit to Richmond in April 1865, when he toured the city days after it fell to Union forces and while it still smoldered from evacuation fires.
