On The Waterfront: Belle Isle

By John M. Coski

The Museum’s new building at Tredegar Iron Works is not only a world-class destination in itself, but also the de facto headquarters for the other important Civil War sites on Richmond’s historic waterfront. The Museum’s tours and programs highlight the connections between Tredegar and some of those other sites. This article is the first in a projected series of magazine articles about those connections.

If you leave the American Civil War Museum parking lot, turn to your right, and walk along the James River for 1/4 mile, you come to a curious, undulating footbridge suspended from the highway bridge over the James. The path provides pedestrian access to Belle Isle, the jewel in the crown of the city’s James River Park System.

The largest island at the falls of the James River, Belle Isle is large enough and close enough to be integral to the city. But, because it is surrounded by rapids, it was also isolated enough to serve as a “hermitage” for its original English owner, William Byrd, or as a prison camp for Federal enlisted men – as it did during the American Civil War.

HUMAN SKELETONS

“The authorities are debating the propriety of removing all of the Yankee prisoners from the tobacco factories to Belle Isle in the James river,” announced the Richmond Daily Dispatch on July 9,1862. “It is thought that the location would suit for the purposes indicated admirably. The temptation to escape would not be enhanced by the change in position, while fewer men would serve as a guard. The river is of considerable depth around the shores of the island.”

Thus began Belle Isle’s most historically famous role.

The Belle Isle prison was more infamous than most people today realize. The first images of living skeletons that appeared in the Northern press – images that most people associate with Andersonville – were taken of Belle Isle survivors released early in 1864 after suffering from exposure and disease during a famously cold winter. Andersonville, Georgia, the most deadly and notorious of all Civil War prison camps, was the destination of the thousands of Belle Isle prisoners who survived the winter.

Unlike the prison at Andersonville, Belle Isle was not surrounded by a tall stockade. Because it was on an island, a low earthen wall and a corresponding trench were adequate to demarcate the camp’s perimeter. Located on an exposed flat plain that occupied the island’s eastern side, the camp was secured by a thin gray line of Confederate guards and dominated by several pieces of artillery placed on the hill that occupied most of the island’s 60 acres and frowned down upon the plain.

Prisoners on the island could look across the James River and see the Virginia State Capitol building (also serving as the Confederate capitol), downtown Richmond, and – directly across the river – Tredegar Iron Works and Hollywood Cemetery. Richmond citizens who cared to do so could gaze across the river to glimpse a sea of Sibley tents and watch the activity on a pestilent human anthill.

Since the early 1850s a railroad bridge had connected Belle Isle to the south side of the river, but not to the Richmond side. Confederate prison authorities transported supplies to Belle Isle on boats launched from a landing at the foot of Tredegar Iron Works. Occasionally, Confederate authorities launched something else fromTredegar: artillery shells.

On November 18, 1862, the Confederate Navy’s ordnance department fired a 7-inch Brooke rifle (similar in appearance to the heavy gun now sitting directly in front of the American Civil War Museum) at a target placed at the base of the hill on Belle Isle. This occurred during a months-long period when there were no prisoners on Belle Isle. But, according to the diary of a New York prisoner, test firings continued in the summer of 1863 and on one occasion a stray shot passed through an unoccupied tent.

Visitors to Belle Isle today see little or no evidence of the infamous prisoner of war camp that once occupied the plain that faces Tredegar. The construction of the new highway bridge abutments that loom overhead (and from which the access bridge is suspended) in the late 1980s scraped clean the site of the camp, leaving virtually no archaeological evidence.

METAL SKELETONS

Even before the construction of the bridge, however, evidence of the camp’s existence was lost to the intensive industrial activity that flourished there for the century after the War, the relics of which are still visible today.

Two decades before the incorporation of Tredegar Iron Works in 1836, the Belle Isle Manufacturing Company began operations on the southern shore of the island. The swiftlymoving water that later made the island an ideal prison site also provided power for an iron manufactory. Rhys Davies, one of the Welshmen who established Tredegar, also helped build a new rolling mill on Belle Isle in 1838. Davies was on Belle Isle attending to that project when a fellow worker stabbed him to death for reasons unexplained.

The Belle Isle Manufacturing Company evolved into the Old Dominion Iron and Nail Works, which became one of the nation’s premier nail suppliers on the eve of the Civil War. In 1860, it had approximately 175 employees, some of whom lived on the island with their families. Also among its employees were eight enslaved African Americans, whom the company owned.

Located south and west of the prison camp, Old Dominion continued to operate during the War, and sold thousands of kegs of nails to the Confederate government. Many prisoners believed that the “red hot furnaces” and belching smokestacks they saw to their left as they marched to the camp were part of Tredegar.

An aged brick wall hidden in the woods is all that remains of the original iron manufacturing plant. More visible to the modern visitor is the iron skeleton of an elongated building that served as one of Old Dominion’s turn-of-the-century puddling mills. A tall skeleton that visitors see first as they cross the pedestrian bridge is the remains of the “Chrysler Building,” so named because it produced tank hatches for the Chrysler Corporation during World War I.

By World War I, the thriving nail works that had been nestled on the island’s southern shore sprawled northward to cover the footprint of the Civil War prison camp. At its height, Belle Isle was home to the Iron and Nail Works with its multiple puddling and rolling mills, the Richmond Forgings Corporation, the Richmond Pipe and Foundry Works, a “marshalling yard” for the Southern Railroad, a hydroelectric plant that produced electricity for the city’s streetcar system, and a rock quarry – and, later, a radio tower and billboard located on the top of the hill.

The low-lying plain that the prison camp had occupied became crowded with multiple iron factories, as seen in the photograph below published ca. 1908 by the Detroit Publishing Company.

Library of Congress

The island’s intensive industrial use also brought an extensive human presence. Old Dominion Iron and Nail grew to a workforce of approximately 1,000 people – African Americans, European immigrants, and native born whites – many of whom lived in quarters on the island. At various times the Belle Isle community boasted a chapel and a mission school (which had existed since before the Civil War), and a baseball team.

On the ground where Federal prisoners struggled for their lives during the War, postwar industrial laborers staged multiple strikes for higher wages. Where prisoners suffered from cold and disease, workers suffered appalling accidents that killed or maimed dozens.

Swiftly-moving water attracted industry to Belle Isle, but bridges over the water transformed the island into a booming industrial center. In the early 1870s, the Tredegar Company erected a railroad bridge that finally connected the island to the city. That bridge burned in 1909, but a one-way road and pedestrian bridge was built on the stone piers, and a new railroad trestle stood until 1948.

In 1972 Hurricane Agnes brought record flooding that destroyed the bridges linking Belle Isle to Tredegar and to the south side. For the first time in 120 years Belle Isle was effectively isolated.

Even before the hurricane, the last industrial plant on Belle Isle, a manufacturer of sheet metal and parts for airplane refrigeration systems, had suffered a catastrophic fire and all but ceased operations. The city already was negotiating with the two corporate owners of the island to acquire it for recreational use.

As early as 1909, the Virginia Electric and Railway Company (the ancestral organization of Dominion Energy), which owned most of the island’s acreage suggested transforming the “high part” into a “pleasure park” for city residents.

In the late 1960s, planners envisaged a park with modern facilities accessible by a monorail or cable cars. An alternative vision for Belle Isle’s future emphasized its natural resources: hiking trails, bird watching, and white water rapids in the heart of downtown Richmond. The opening of the new footbridge in April 1991 made that vision a reality.

Just as Belle Isle’s heavy industry wound down, so, too, did the Tredegar Iron Works. In 1957 Tredegar moved its iron-making operations to suburban Chesterfield County and sold the riverfront property to the Albemarle Paper Company, which later merged with the Ethyl Corporation. In the early 1970s, Ethyl determined to restore surviving ruins at the Tredegar site. Its chairman also championed the reinvigoration of Richmond’s historic waterfront.

Both Tredegar and Belle Isle are most famous (or infamous) as important Civil War sites, but they served much longer as civilian industrial sites. Today they are recreational and historical destinations for local citizens and tourists from around the globe.

John M. Coski is the Museum’s historian. He is researching a book on the history of Belle Isle.

The first images the Northern public saw of emaciated former prisoners came not from Andersonville, Georgia, but Belle Isle.

Library of Congress