The Industrial Confederacy: The Augusta Powder Works

Drawing of the Refinery Building of the Confederate Powder Works (Library of Congress)

Early in the Civil War, in spring/summer 1861, the Confederacy needed to establish a local supply of gunpowder in order to fight the Union armies. President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, tasked Colonel George Washington Rains with creating that local supply and Rains left Richmond, Virginia on July 10, 1861 to find a location to establish a powder works for the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis gave Rains this assignment before the armies clashed at the Battle of First Manassas, but after fighting had already started in smaller engagements such as the 1861 Western Virginia Campaign. George Rains was a graduate of West Point with engineering, chemistry, and mineralogy experience. By the end of July, he had chosen Augusta, GA as the location for the Confederate powder works. The city was somewhat insulated from the movement of the armies but connected to much of the south through rail lines. The Augusta Canal also provided for water power to run the manufacturing equipment in the works.

George Washington Rains

While Rains led the design and construction of the powder words at Augusta, there was an immediate need for gunpowder, particularly for the western army under General Albert Sydney Johnson. The only source of gunpowder for the western theater was Sycamore Powder Mill in Nashville, TN that was producing only small quantities, not enough to sustain the Confederate armies. Rains worked with the Tennessee governor to work locally with supplies of niter to increase the supply of saltpeter (one of the necessary components of gunpowder). He visited and reorganized the local suppliers to be more efficient and wrote a pamphlet to teach more efficient ways to extract the mineral (“Notes on Making Saltpeter from the Earth of the Caves”). Rains reworked the supply system near Nashville so that by October 1861 a refinery there was producing 1,500 pounds of saltpeter a day which was then turned into gunpowder at the Sycamore Mill. Rains used this operation to provide gunpowder to the army while the Augusta works was in construction as well as to train workers in the manufacturing process before sending them to Augusta. Rains also moved the Sycamore machinery to Augusta in February 1862 just before the Union army occupied the area.

Construction of the Augusta Powder Works took seven months and cost $385,000. To design the powder works Rains relied on a book from Britain that explained the process of producing gunpowder in a plant near London, but Rains designed and altered much of the equipment and building design at the Augusta works. Rains used brick and stone to build the works because the damp environment around the canal would likely make wood decay faster. The powder works was designed as a series of 28 separate buildings so that damage would be minimized in the case of an explosion and the buildings were set up in order of the manufacturing process. Raw materials went into the first set of buildings and finished gunpowder came out the other end of the sequence, akin to an early assembly line process.

The first step in the process was processing and refining the raw materials of saltpeter (niter), sulfur, and charcoal, and Rains developed new techniques to refine and produce a large quantity of all three. Raw niter is mined from limestone caves and contains natural impurities that weaken gunpowder by absorbing moisture. The typical process was to do several rounds of washing and crystallization, but Rains developed a new process and new equipment that would boil, cool, crystalize, and wash the niter in one process with less labor. This allowed the works to produce a large quantity of pure niter, 8,000-10,000 pounds a day. Sulfur also needed to be purified and Rains developed a process where they would boil the sulfur and pour it into wooden boxes that were ten inches square and five feet tall. As the sulfur cooled the impurities sank to the bottom leaving the top three feet of the “cone” as pure sulfur. Charcoal was typically made from willow wood for gunpowder, but Rains was unable to procure enough raw material for the works. Instead, he experimented with cottonwood, which was more readily available in Georgia. The works used a process of heating the coot in large cylinders for two hours and then using barrels of bronze balls to grind the wood into fine charcoal powder.

“Confederate Powder Works, August, Ga.” Photographed between 1861 and 1865 (Library of Congress)

The processing of raw materials occurred in the refinery, the principle building of the Augusta Powder Works. This large (250 ft by 275 ft) building surrounded the chimney obelisk and was fashioned after the British Parliament. The eastern wing of the refinery contained a 1,500 ton saltpeter and sulfur warehouse while the western wing housed a laboratory for testing gunpowder. The central building housed the refinery processes plus machine shops, a charcoal department, and the mill offices in the four corner towers. The processed raw materials were next went to the Weighing House where the three materials were added together in a mixture of 45 pounds saltpeter to 9 pounds charcoal to 6 pounds sulfur. This mixture was then moistened and sent to the Incorporating Mills.  

The Incorporating Mills were located east of the refinery. This was a 296-foot rectangular building where the powder mixture was ground and mixed between rollers and an iron flat bed. The building had about a dozen separate incorporating mills, and each was constructed separately to reduce the risk of explosion. Each mill section was constructed with three walls of stone and brick and one wall of wood facing away from the other mills. This way if one mill exploded the damage would be minimized to that mill. Rains also developed a system that would immediately wet the iron bed plates of each mill in the case of fire or an explosion. Along the entire mixing building there was a subterranean archway with a 300-foot long shaft powered by a steam engine that ground the finished mixture of sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter under rollers for an hour to bring it to the state of a “mill cake.”

From the Incorporating Mills a trolley system brought the “mill cakes” to four cooling magazines about 100 Yards from the mill to allow the gunpowder to cool. Next was the Press House were hydraulic pressed stamped the powder into more solid cakes. The granulating building then broke the cakes up with toothed cylinders and used vibrating screens to separate the gunpowder according to grain size. Larger grained gunpowder was used by artillery while the smaller grains were used for shoulder and small arms. In a separate building the gunpowder went through the final drying phase. Rains combined the usually three-step process into one step by using revolving cylinders and hot air to dry, dust, and glaze the grains. The gunpowder was the most explosive at this stage so the boiler and furnace was housed 200 yards away from the drying building and the chimney an additional 100 yards away. The finished gunpowder was brought another 500 yards down the canal to be weighed and packed into wooden boxes of Rains’ design and then the boxes were stored in a 100-ton magazine further down the canal before they were shipped across the Confederacy by rail. The entire set of buildings lined two miles of the Augusta Canal.

Rains used a combination of enslaved and white labor at the powder works. At the beginning of the operation, white men were used to do the skilled tasks of the process while enslaved men were used to do the unskilled physical labor. The records do not differentiate between black and white laborers until August 1863; in that month the records indicate that 53 men worked at the mills, 27 white men and 26 black men. Over time, the demand for manpower in the Confederate armies meant that more enslaved labor was used in the mill and more black men performed skilled labor as Rains’ skilled white employees were conscripted for the military. White women and children were also used as labor in the mills as the war progressed. In October 1864 there was an unsuccessful strike by female mill workers over low pay and unsafe working conditions (this partially was a result from the August 1864 explosion that killed nine workers, including a child).

The biggest threats to the powder works were the Union armies and the risk of explosion. The location of Augusta was largely insulated from the movement of the armies for much of the war. The biggest direct threat to the mills came in 1864 as Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union Army marched through Georgia. Fortunately for the Confederacy, Sherman bypassed Augusta in the march from Atlanta to Savannah and the powder works continued to produce gunpowder without major disruption. To combat the risk of explosion, Rains designed the complex with buildings spread out so that an explosion would be contained to one area and not destroy the entire works. In addition, he used sentries at strategic places to watch for risks and required workers to wear rubber-soled shoes. Despite his precautions, the powder mills did have four explosions over the course of its operation, three of which were in the Incorporating Mills. The largest explosion occurred in August 1864 and killed nine people (eight men and 1 boy). This explosion was caused by a worker who liked to smoke when the foreman was absent and who dropped a match in the granulating building, setting off 18,000 pounds of gunpowder.  

Sibley Mill with the Confederate Powder Works Chimney today

The Augusta Powder Works operated until April 1865 when the Confederacy surrendered and the Civil War ended. During operation the works manufactured about 7,000 pounds of gunpowder a day for a total of 2,750,000 pounds produced during the war. This was enough to supply the Confederate military through the war and have a surplus of 70,000 pounds left when the war ended. The Confederate Powder Works was the only permanent, industrial complex constructed by the Confederate States of America. After the Civil War the Federal Government confiscated the powder works and sold the land between 1868 and 1871. The buildings were largely deemed unimportant at that point and most were demolished in 1872 to allow for a project widening the Augusta Canal. During the demolition, George W. Rains requested that the smokestack be left standing as a memorial to those who had fought for the Confederacy.

The Sibley Manufacturing Company formed in 1880 and purchased the powder works site. Using bricks from the demolished powder works, the company constructed the Sibley Mill between 1880 and 1882. It eventually became part of the Graniteville Mills which made denim until 2006. A restoration and stabilization project of the 150-foot tall chimney began in 2002 and cost $192,000. There was a rededication ceremony of the chimney on October 9, 2010 and the Sons of Confederate Veterans Brig. Gen. E. Porter Alexander No. 158 received a preservation award from Historic Augusta for their work in preserving the structure.

Dr. Kathleen Logothetis Thompson earned her PhD in Nineteenth Century/Civil War America from West Virginia University, and also holds a M.A. from WVU and a B.A. from Siena College. Her research is on mental trauma and coping among Union soldiers and she is currently working on her first book, tentatively titled War on the Mind. She currently teaches history at several colleges and university. Kathleen was a seasonal interpreter at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park for several years, led tours of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, and is the co-editor of Civil Discourse.

Sources:

“Explosion at the Confederate Powder Works.” Explore Georgia’s Historical Markers. Georgia Historical Society. Accessed April 15, 2021. https://georgiahistory.com/ghmi_marker_updated/explosion-at-the-confederate-powder-works/.

Kirby, Bill. “The Way We Were: Powderworks survived unfortunate blast.” The Augusta Chronicle. August 19, 2018. Accessed April 15, 2021. https://www.augustachronicle.com/news/20180819/way-we-were-powderworks-survived-unfortunate-blast.

“Preservation Awards.” Historic Augusta News (Summer/Fall 2011): 20. Accessed April 15, 2021. https://www.historicaugusta.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/SummerFall2011.pdf.

Savas, Theodore P. “Heart of the Southern War Machine: The Augusta Powder Works was an unparalleled accomplishment of military industry.” HistoryNet. June 2017. Accessed April 19, 2021. https://www.historynet.com/heart-of-the-southern-war-machine.htm.

“Sibley Mill Augusta Cyberworks.” Augusta Tomorrow. Accessed April 19, 2021. https://www.augustatomorrow.com/portfolio_page/sibley-mill-augusta-cyberworks/.

“Sibley Mill and Confederate Powder Woks Chimney.” Augusta. National Park Service. Accessed April 15, 2021. https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/augusta/sibleymill.html.