Orignally aired on October 27, 1995 - In part 61 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson describes the shortage of lead that plagued the Southern Confederacy during the entire conflict. Most of the commodity they used came from lead mines in Wytheville and Austinville.
#61 – Lead Mines at Wytheville
The Southern Confederacy was never a land of plenty. It was born in need, and it died in want. A Confederate government of highly limited resources often had to utilize blockade-runners and contracts with commercial firms in order to obtain badly needed war supplies.
Lead was among the most vital of these commodities. The ideal in the Civil War was to issue 140 rounds of ammunition to each Confederate soldier going into battle, but the Southern ration never got to that level. Lead was in short supply from beginning to end. By the eve of the 1863 battle of Gettysburg, Southern infantrymen were restricted to three issues of cartridges per month – whether or not they had been or were about to be in combat.
Indeed, so scarce was lead in the wartime South that Johnny Rebs would scavenge battlefields for spent bullets and send them to the arsenals hundreds of miles to the rear to be melted down and recast. Southern officials issued appeals requesting citizens to strip their homes of all lead articles such as pipes, roofs, window weights, unused water mains, and common utensils.
Small lead mines existed in eastern Tennessee and Arkansas. Yet, as an official of the Confederate Ordnance Department declared after the war. “Our lead was obtained chiefly, and in the last years of the war entirely, from the lead mines at Wytheville, Virginia. The mines were worked night and day, and the lead converted into bullets as fast as received. The old regulation shrapnel shells were filled with leaded balls and Sulphur. The Confederacy had neither lead nor Sulphur to spare, and used instead small iron balls and filled with asphalt.”
The state-owned mines at Wytheville had supplied George Washington’s army with bullets in the American Revolution. After the new nation came into being, Virginia officials sold the lead mines to two Austin brothers. (Stephen F. Austin, the so-called “Father of Texas”, was the son of one of the owners.)
While the mining facilities were at Wytheville, the lead quarries themselves were seven miles away at Austinville. Lead production was a thriving business in southwest Virginia when civil war began. What made the Wytheville works outstanding was the fact that they turned out three different varieties of lead: carbonate, oxide, and the high-quality sulphuret (or “blue ore”, as it was called).
The Confederate State Nitre Corps monitored wartime production, with General Josiah Gorgas in overall charge of operations. Demands of war brought a doubling of production at the Wythe mines. When conscription drained manpower from the quarries, Confederate authorities impressed slaves to continue the work. Output at the Wytheville mines averaged about 80,000 pounds monthly. In all, these mines produced just under 3.3 million pounds of lead for the Confederacy.
Union officials came to regard the Wytheville lead operation as the most important target in southwest Virginia. At least four attempts were made to destroy the facilities. The first stab was a Union cavalry operation in May, 1864, that Confederates under legendary horseman John Hunt Morgan defeated. On December 17 of that year, a second Federal force under General George Stoneman captured the mines. Union horsemen poured oil on the equipment and set fire to the works before galloping back into the mountains.
Persistent Virginians repaired the damage; and, in March, 1865, the mines resumed production. A third Federal attack early the next month was unsuccessful. On April 7, a heavier assault by Union cavalry finally drove off the defenders. The lead works were destroyed a second time. Forty-eight hours later, General Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox.
In its four-year history, the South manufactured 150 million cartridges from the 10 million pounds of lead. Fully a third of that vital chemical element came from Austinville and Wytheville. Despite the seeming isolation of the southwestern quadrant of Virginia, citizens there did much to sustain the Confederacy in its four shaky years of existence.
