We traveled to ODW Williamsburg near Williamsburg, VA on 04/06/2011. Then on 04/09/2011 we visited Richmond National Battlefield Park Units: Tredegar Iron Works and Chimborazo Hospital. By 1860, Anderson’s father-in-law, Dr. Robert Archer, had joined the business. Tredegar became a leading iron producer in the country. The company produced about 70 steam locomotives between 1850 and 1860. From 1852 to 1854, John Souther also managed the locomotive shop at Tredegar. Its locomotive production work is sometimes listed with combinations of the names Anderson, Souther, Delaney, and Pickering. Prior to the Civil War, industry expanded at the Tredegar site under Anderson’s direction to include a new flour mill on land leased to Lewis D. Crenshaw and a stove works on land leased to A.J. Bowers and Asa Snyder. By 1860, Crenshaw and Co. had established the Crenshaw Woolen Mill on adjoining land they owned. This enterprise employed more than 50 people. The Crenshaw Woolen Mill became “the principal source of supply for the [Confederate]Army’s requirements of uniform material” during the first half of the Civil War. A May 16, 1863 fire on the Tredegar/Crenshaw site damaged the mill, which was not rebuilt, and Tredegar purchased the land from Crenshaw and Co. by 1863. By 1860, the Tredegar Iron Works was the largest of its kind in the South, a fact that played a significant role in the decision to relocate the capital of the Confederacy from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond in May 1861. Tredegar supplied high-quality munitions to the South during the war. The company also manufactured railroad steam locomotives in the same period. Tredegar Iron Works made the iron plating for the first Confederate ironclad warship, the CSS Virginia which fought in the historic Battle of Hampton Roads in March 1862. Tredegar is also credited with the production of approximately 1,100 artillery pieces during the war which was about half of the South’s total domestic production of artillery between the war years of 1861-1865. Tredegar also produced a giant rail-mounted siege cannon during the conflict. The picture is of an old wall of the complex with the Pattern Building / Visitor Center in the background.
The Capital of the Confederacy and one of the South’s most developed cities, Richmond, Virginia was the primary target of Union campaigns in the East. It was also the central destination for the thousands of Confederates wounded on the battlefields of Virginia. Civil War Richmond was destined to become a vast hospital. The city was flooded with casualties after the first battle of Manassas, quickly overwhelming the existing hospitals. Wounded were treated in any space available – hotels, private homes, even barns. Realizing that a long war and thousands more casualties lay ahead, Southern leaders ordered the construction of five general hospitals in Richmond to treat the military’s injured and ill. The most famous of those institutions — the “hospital on the hill”– was Chimborazo. The picture is of the Visitor Center at Chimborazo Hospital.
The picture is of a model of the Chimborazo Hospital Complex.
We continue our travels in the DC Area by driving to Cherry Hill RV Park in College Park, MD on 04/20/2011. While there on 04/24/2011 we visited Jones Point Lighthouse. The area surrounding the Potomac River has been a bustling center of trade and commerce since the earliest European exploration of North America. Captain John Smith sailed up the river in 1608, and his accounts, along with those of subsequent pioneers, attracted many settlers to the region. Originally the settlers did a brisk business trading with Native Americans for beaver pelts. One such adventurer was Cadwalder Jones, a British trader and mapmaker, who established a cabin in 1699 along the Potomac River at a spot that would later be named Jones Point in his honor. Around this time, lucrative tobacco crops were beginning to take the place of animal pelts, just as one hundred years later wheat fields would supplant tobacco as the most profitable venture. Wheat was an important export crop and also led to the development of mills and bakeries in the fledgling town of Alexandria, VA. Along with the ports of Georgetown and Washington City, Alexandria would form the backbone of commerce and industry along the Potomac. A lighthouse at Jones Point was requested to warn ships traversing the river of dangerous sandbars. In 1852 the Lighthouse Board received a Congressional appropriation of $5,000 to purchase land and erect a beacon at Jones Point. Three years later, the money was used to purchase a tract of land measuring 30 by 100 feet from the Manassas Gap Railroad Company for $501. The land included one of the boundary stones of the original District of Columbia. The stone marked the southern point of the diamond-shaped district and was installed by George Washington. The stone is still visible today in the seawall just south of the lighthouse, and to the north of the lighthouse a marker designating the boundary between Maryland-Virginia can be seen. First lit on May 3, 1856, by keeper George L. Deeton, the lighthouse is a wooden clapboard house-shaped structure with a pitched cedar roof, sitting on a brick foundation. The house contains a porch perpendicular to the river, which includes what would appear to be the front door. In the lawn near the porch is the six-foot-square masonry foundation of what was a water well. The actual front door to the house is larger and located on the side of the building facing the river. Inside on the main floor, a central hallway originally divided the space into two large rooms, each containing a large brick fireplace. In the middle of the hallway a hatch door leads to the basement, which contains two large rooms with brick floors. Fireplaces also adorn these spaces and are positioned directly underneath the main floor hearths so they can use the same chimneys. Above the main floor is one large room topped by a pitched dormer-style ceiling. A ladder ascends through this ceiling up to the lantern room, whose interior is like that of a large barrel. The lantern room contains ten trapezoidal windows along with slots for ventilation. The exterior of the house was painted white, while the protruding lantern was painted black. An iron catwalk formerly encircled the lantern room, which housed a fifth-order Fresnel lens that ships could see from up to nine miles away. Because the Woodrow Wilson Bridge was replaced by a brand-new bridge, the lighthouse and park are under repair. The picture is of the Jones Point Lighthouse.
