Richmond and Petersburg area

We left the “Historic Triangle” - fancy name for Williamsburg, Yorktown, and Jamestown, VA! Sunday noon and drove back to Petersburg area to our campground in Dinwiddie, VA.   One problem, the owner had no record of our reservation and was full.   Luckily we found another campground 2 miles up the road.   Whew!

Monday we drove into Richmond to the National Park Service Tredegar Iron Works.   We had been to both the Richmond and Petersburg battlefields on previous trips, but had not heard about Tredegar.  Evidently the Works were already well known when the Civil War began in 1861.  In the two decades before the war Tredegar and other smaller iron foundries made Richmond the center of iron manufacture in the southern US.   By 1860 it had about 800 laborers, both while and black, free and enslaved.   Tredegar covered nearly five acres and operated around the clock to meet the demands of the Confederacy for artillery, ammunition and other war-related materials.   The foundries produced almost 1,100 field and siege cannon, and provided the armor plating that protected several Southern warships, including the CSS Virginia.  The iron works played an important role in rebuilding the devastated South after 1865.  

Tredegar contributed to World War I and II before being closed in 1952.

Our plans were to visit the Virginia house and the 1812 John Wickham House during our stay, but the Virginia house is no longer available for tours and we were advised by the Welcome Center that there was no parking near the Wickham house so we regrouped and headed back to Dinwiddie County.