Bruce Vail
Captain
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2015
Thanks Bruce. I didn't know that and I live in Blaenau Gwent.
p.s. I wonder if Rhys and I are related.
Really? When you mentioned Wales earlier, I just assumed you were already aware of the connection.
By the time the Civil War started, a man named Joseph Anderson was the owner, and the Welsh connection had been broken, except for the Tredegar name. Anderson was of Scots descent, and had all the characteristics we commonly associate with the Scots. He did appreciate the value of experienced UK iron workers, though, and sought to recruit immigrants to Richmond even during the most trying years of the war. He wasn't successful in the effort, however, and labor shortages of all kinds plagued the iron works throughout the war years.
I don't want to he hard on the Blaneau Gwent Heritage Forum, but its not really accurate to say the Richmond plant "greatly influenced US industrial development and history." Iron factories in the North were more technologically advanced, and British companies were selling a lot of iron rails in the South into the early 1860s, partially because Anderson just couldn't compete. Anderson's real forte was munitions, especially cannon, and he was an important contractor to the US federal government before the Civil War. Indeed, much of Anderson's success as a businessman 1861-1865 can be laid to the fact that he had the only factory in the South that was already up and running and able to produce new cannon. The Confederates would work hard to establish other new cannon production centers in other parts of the South, but were never successful on the scale needed.
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