previous next

[126] box cars; many more had been previously destroyed by the great fire. Also, the buildings belonging to the railroad station-two large freight sheds, including 60 sets of six-mule-team harnesses, 1,000 pounds of trace chains, quantities of nails and spikes; about five tons of railroad machinery, with a large amount of articles of a military character; 650 car wheels; two buildings filled with Confederate stationery; 25 powder mills, the mills being destroyed by being blown up; an armory near the Congaree River, comprising warehouse, machine shops, foundries, and offices; besides the foregoing, an immense amount of ordnance of every description. The smokestacks of six factories were ruined; a shed near the Common, containing ten tons of machinery belonging to the Confederate army, all packed in boxes, was consumed and the machinery broken up.

In addition to the above our Ordnance Department used all small arms and ammunition practicable, but destroyed the remainder-perhaps 10,000 small arms and 43 cannon. Of the 10,000 rounds of artillery ammunition and 500,000 rounds for small arms, part was taken and part destroyed; also rendered useless infantry and cavalry equipments beyond estimate. Here at Columbia the magazines were ample and well filled. We undertook to get rid of the ammunition, loaded shells and such like, by throwing the same into the river. During this operation a fearful accident occurred, in which we lost in killed and severely wounded not less than 20 men. The magazines themselves, after being depleted sufficiently for safety, were blown to pieces by igniting the powder that remained. A witness, then in Columbia, says: “The explosions of the magazines this evening caused the ”

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Congaree (South Carolina, United States) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: