The Confederate Powderworks: Two Miles of Smoke and War

The chimney rises one hundred and fifty feet above the Augusta Canal, a hollow obelisk of brick standing alone in a strip of greenway. It is the last surviving piece of the Confederate Powderworks, and it is almost certainly the only permanent structure completed by the Confederate States of America that Union forces did not destroy.

In eighteen sixty-two, Colonel George Washington Rains chose this site with deliberate calculation. Augusta was deep enough inland to be difficult to reach, connected by rail to every corner of the Confederacy, and the canal provided both water power and transportation. The arsenal that had been a federal facility before Georgia seized it in January of eighteen sixty-one gave Rains a ready nucleus. He expanded outward from there, and when construction finished, the complex covered two miles along the canal and comprised twenty-six buildings.

What those buildings produced was staggering. The Powderworks ran three shifts a day, turning out three and a half tons of first-quality gunpowder every twenty-four hours. Before the facility closed in April of eighteen sixty-five, it had manufactured more than two million seven hundred thousand pounds of powder, a majority of the ammunition used by Confederate forces in the field throughout the war.

When Union troops entered Augusta on May third, eighteen sixty-five, Rains ordered the machinery destroyed to prevent its capture. The buildings were eventually torn down. Only the chimney remained, and after the war Rains himself proposed preserving it as a monument to the Confederate dead. He got his wish. The obelisk stands today on Goodrich Street along the canal path, a few feet from the towpath where mules once pulled barge-loads of finished powder toward the railroad. There is no celebration in the chimney's survival, only the weight of what was made here, and for what purpose, and at what eventual cost.