Half the Confederacy’s artillery, and the plating for the CSS Virginia
The Tredegar Iron Works stands on the north bank of the James River in Richmond, Virginia. It began in 1836, when a group of Richmond businessmen led by Francis B. Deane Jr. set out to supply iron for the railroad boom. They hired a young engineer, Rhys Davies, who brought fellow ironworkers from Tredegar in Wales to build the furnaces and rolling mills, and the works took the Welsh town's name. It opened in 1837 straight into the Panic of 1837, and in September 1838 Davies died of stab wounds from a fight with a workman.
In 1841 the owners handed the works to Joseph Reid Anderson, a 28-year-old civil engineer. He leased it, bought it outright in 1848, and used his military connections to win federal contracts; between 1844 and 1860 Tredegar cast 881 cannon for the government. Anderson also brought in enslaved labour to cut his costs, and by 1861 half of the 900 workers were enslaved, many in skilled positions.
By 1860 Tredegar was the largest ironworks in the South, a big reason the Confederacy moved its capital from Montgomery to Richmond in May 1861. Anderson, the "Ironmaker to the Confederacy," turned out around 1,100 artillery pieces, about half the South's own wartime production, among them the heavy Brooke rifles, and rolled the iron plate for the CSS Virginia, the ironclad that fought at Hampton Roads in March 1862. Metal and skilled hands ran short; in the summer of 1861 the works went a whole month without casting a single gun, and in June 1864 Hunter's cavalry destroyed its best gun-iron furnaces. On the night of 2 to 3 April 1865, as Richmond burned during the evacuation, the Tredegar battalion held the works, the mob turned back, and Tredegar became one of the few Civil War buildings in the city to survive.
Anderson won a pardon from President Andrew Johnson and was back in business before the year was out. Francis Thomas Glasgow, father of the novelist Ellen Glasgow, rose to managing director and worked there until he retired at 82. The company never made the move to steel, but it made munitions for the Spanish–American War and both world wars until a 1952 fire gutted the plant. In the 1970s Ethyl Corporation stabilised what was left and restored the gun foundry.
Today the foundry houses the American Civil War Museum, the Pattern Building is the main visitor centre for Richmond National Battlefield Park. Viewing platforms crown the old twenty-foot brick arches, and the site anchors the mile-and-a-quarter Canal Walk.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
