The Arsenal, the War, and Sherman's March

The stone foundations you can see at Arsenal Park are the remains of one of the most consequential industrial sites in the Confederacy.

The United States Arsenal at Fayetteville was built beginning in eighteen thirty-eight. It occupied several acres near the Cape Fear River and employed hundreds of workers producing rifles, ammunition, and gun carriages. When North Carolina seceded from the Union in eighteen sixty-one, local militia seized the arsenal without resistance. Confederate forces then installed arms-making machinery transported from the captured federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, making Fayetteville's arsenal one of the primary small-arms factories in the South.

For nearly four years it armed Confederate soldiers.

In March of eighteen sixty-five, General William Tecumseh Sherman entered North Carolina with an army of approximately sixty thousand men, moving north through the Carolinas after his famous march through Georgia. He reached Fayetteville on March eleventh and established his headquarters here. The arsenal had been stripped of its most valuable machinery by retreating Confederate forces, but Sherman ordered what remained destroyed.

His soldiers used railroad iron as battering rams against the walls, then set the ruins on fire. Sherman departed on March fourteenth. What he left behind was rubble.

The records go quiet on exactly how many civilian workers and their families were affected by the arsenal's destruction. The economic blow to Fayetteville was severe. A city that had built itself around this industry now had to find another way forward.

The foundation stones remain. They are part of the Museum of the Cape Fear Historical Complex, open to the public, a few minutes from downtown. Standing at them is one of the more direct physical connections you can find to the last weeks of the Civil War in the South.