The Arsenal That Started a War's Supply Chain

The United States Army established an ordnance depot in Augusta in eighteen sixteen. The location made sense: the city had reliable rail connections, the Savannah River for water transport, and the canal for industrial power. For more than forty years the Arsenal stored and maintained military arms and equipment without incident, a quiet federal installation in the middle of a Southern city.

That changed on January twenty-fourth, eighteen sixty-one, five days after Georgia voted to secede from the Union. Georgia Governor Joseph Brown demanded the surrender of the Arsenal. The federal commander, Captain Arnold Elzey, recognized that resistance was impossible. He transferred the facility to state control the next day, handing over twenty-seven thousand muskets and rifles, two cannon, and two twelve-pound howitzers.

Six months later, Confederate Chief of Ordnance Josiah Gorgas placed the Arsenal under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George Washington Rains and directed him to transform it into the nucleus of a major war-production complex. Rains used that nucleus to build the Confederate Powderworks immediately adjacent, along the canal. By the time Union troops entered Augusta on May third, eighteen sixty-five, the Arsenal had been the administrative heart of the Confederacy's largest ammunition production operation for three years.

After the war the facility returned to federal control. It operated as an Army post through nineteen fifty-five. When it closed, the property passed to Georgia's Board of Education, and the Junior College of Augusta opened there in nineteen fifty-seven.