Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 37.djvu/15

Rh and the Leeds Foundry at New Orleans; the loss of the latter was one of the sorest consequences of the fall of that city. There were several fairly respectable machine shops of the second class. There were woolen mills in Virginia, notably the Crenshaw Mills at Richmond, and several cotton mills, turning out coarse cloth, which, however, proved of enormous value, two of the largest being at Augusta and Macon. There were twenty paper mills, for the most part small, of which eight were in North Carolina and five in South Carolina. There were small iron furnaces and forges in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama. But the production of iron by these were very meagre. There had been recently established at Ducktown, Tenn., the smelting and rolling of copper, though upon no great scale, and some lead was being produced from the ore of Wytheville, Va. There were, of course, numerous carpenters' and blacksmiths' shops, and there were a very moderate number of tanneries. Coal was mined chiefly in Virginia, the Cumberland field of Tennessee, and in Alabama, and as yet upon no great scale. Skilled mechanics were scarce, and of those in the country a good many had come from Northern States and returned thither when actual hostilities began.

As the war went on the newly organized arsenals and ordnance shops, in addition to their task of producing new munitions of war, had to do an immense amount of work in repairing arms sent in from the field and utilizing material captured or gleaned from the battle fields. Arrangements were made with the field ordnance officers for the collection of such material,, and very large lots of lead, shot and shell, infantry and artillery ammunition, etc., were thus secured. The small arms from the fields of the Seven Days battles below Richmond and the second battle of Manassas, and from the capture of Harper's Ferry by Genl. Jackson, were, in 1862, of immense value.

In the scramble of the early part of the war to obtain at once arms of some kind, both at home and abroad, a most heterogeneous collection was gathered. There were in the hands of the troops Springfield and Enfield muskets, Mississippi and Maynard rifles, Hall's and Sharp's carbines, and arms of English, German, Austrian and Belgian manufacture, of many