At right: Photo of Tredegar Iron Works from the American Civil War Center site.
If you had relatives who lived in Richmond, some of them may have worked at the Tredegar Iron Works. Francis B. Deane founded Tredegar in 1836 and named it for a Welsh town and ironworks. Deane hired 28-year-old Joseph Reid Anderson in 1841 as commercial sales agent. By 1847, Anderson owned the company, obtaining U.S. government contracts for cannons. He also manufactured locomotives, train wheels, spikes, cables, ships’ boilers, naval hardware, iron machinery, and brass items. Anderson employed skilled Northern and foreign workers as well as slaves and some free blacks.
During the Civil War, Tredegar manufactured armor plates for the ironclad CSS Virginia (formerly USS Merrimack), but specialized in cannons. In 1861, Anderson employed 750 men; by 1863, more than 2,500 worked for him. After the war, he managed the company until he died in 1892. Tredegar later cast munitions for the U.S. Army and Navy during the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, and the Korean War. After a fire in 1955, the company moved across the James River, where it operated on a smaller scale until the end of the 20th century. Ethyl Corporation bought the ironworks site in 1957 and restored the surviving buildings in the 1970s.
Today, the American Civil War Center is located in one of the remaining iron works buildings on a beautiful eight-acre National Historic Landmark site on the James River. Richmond’s new Canal Walk fronts the river here, and a pedestrian bridge gives visitors access to Belle Isle, a park that was formerly a Civil War prison camp for captured Union soldiers. Here at Tredegar, five surviving buildings illustrate the ironworks era and the National Park Service operates the Richmond Civil War Visitor Center.
The Center’s permanent exhibit, In the Cause of Liberty, is housed in the 1861 Gun Foundry, and this exhibit opened on 7 October this year to rave reviews by many historians. Visitors begin their tour with Causes of the Civil War, move into the War years, and finish with Legacies.
The exhibit presents the story of the Civil War, its causes, and its legacies from the viewpoints of Unionists, Confederates, and African Americans, the war’s three main participant groups. The Center’s interpretive approach comes from a Foundation-sponsored symposium in which Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson was asked why the Confederates fought. “The central tragedy, the great irony of the war,” he observed, “is that all three groups were fighting for the legacy of the American Revolution, but they profoundly disagreed about what that legacy was.” The war was a matter of honor and principle for all three as each acted to uphold its own vision of America. Each remembered the war differently as well, and to this day the war means different things to different people.
The museum’s interpretation traces all three stories and shows how each group played a different role in the nation’s central drama. The presentation weaves battles and leaders, guns and saddles into the larger drama of how the war affected Northerners and Southerners, men and women, and blacks and whites. The dynamic interplay of three peoples at war changed America forever and created a vastly different country from the one that existed before the war. The exhibit shows how the war produced the basic structure and character of the United States we know today.
Read more at National Public Radio.
Posted by river queen in Businesses
