Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 12.djvu/96

 86 Southern Historical Society Papers.

county, Va., and by placing a skilled workman over the rolling pro- cess at the Tredegar Works he soon produced "skelps" with which he was satisfied. We found that almost any of the good brown hae- matite ores produced an iron of ample strength for the purpose, and the even grain and toughness could be attained by careful re rolling.

Besides the larger armories at Richmond and Fayetteville, smaller establishments grew up at Asheville, N. C, and at Tallassee, Ala. The former was the development of a private enterprise undertaken to repair and fit up old arms, by a citizen (Mr. Pullem ) resident there, and afterwards as a matter of necessity assumed by the Confederate Government. Most of the machinery was moved before the close of the war to Columbia, S. C, whither, as a place of safety, other arms- manufacturing machinery was moved from other points. Tallassee was selected as a good manufacturing point, a large building having been offered to us by the proprietors of the cotton mills there, and some machinery for making pistols moved thither from Columbus, Georgia.

A great part of the work of our armories consisted in repairing arms brought in from the battle-field or sent in from the armies in too damaged a condition to be effectually repaired at the arsenals In this way only could we utilize all the gleanings of the battle-fields. My recollection is that we saved nearly ten thousand stands of arms from the field of Bull Run, and that the battle-fields about Richmond in 1862 gave us about twenty- five thousand excellent arms through the labors of the armory at Richmond.

The original stock of arms it will be remembered, consisted almost wholly of smooth-bore muskets, altered from flint to percussion, using ounce-balls (cal. 69). There were ?ome 15,000 to 20,000 Mississippi rifles ; and then some irregular arms, like Halls rifles and carbines — some short carbines smooth-bore ; and there were even some of the old flint lock muskets. All this original stock disappeared almost wholly from our armies in the first two years of the war, and were re- placed by a better class of arms, rifled and percussioned. It is pretty safe to assume that we had altogether, east and west of the Mississippi, 300,000 infantry, pretty well-armed, by the middle of 1863. We must therefore have procured at least that number for our troops. But we must also have supplied the inevitable waste of two years of active warfare. Placing the good arms thus lost at the moderate estimate of 100,000, we must have received from various sources 400,000 stands of infantry arms in the two years of fighting, ending July ist, 1863. I can only estimate from memory the several sources from which this supply was derived, as follows :