Fort Chiswell: Lead for a Revolution

In the seventeen fifties, Colonel John Chiswell discovered lead ore deposits in the ridges of what is now Wythe County, and a frontier fort rose here to protect them. William Byrd the Third was a partner in the mines, and the partners formed a mining company in seventeen sixty-one. Militia guarded the fort and the mines.

But the mines' most consequential chapter came during the American Revolution. Enslaved laborers dug lead from these hills and smelted it into musket balls that Patriots fired across the Southern theater. Lead from these hills likely went into ammunition for Continental and militia forces in the South.

Tories tried to seize the mines in seventeen eighty and failed. The lead mines kept working through the Civil War, supplying Confederate forces as well. The community still carries Chiswell's name, marking a place where the ground itself shaped the outcome of two American wars.

Chiswell recruited Welsh miners and by seventeen sixty-four owned thirty-six enslaved workers, yet the mines lost money until the Revolution, because lead imported from Europe was cheaper. Charles Lynch became superintendent in seventeen seventy-seven, and the lead was hauled about one hundred thirty miles to the James River and shipped to Westham, where it was made into musket balls. When the Loyalist plot to seize the mines was uncovered in seventeen eighty, seventy-five men were imprisoned.

The mines at nearby Austinville finally closed on December thirty-first, nineteen eighty-one. The fort's remaining foundations lie beneath Interstate Seventy-Seven.