Betcha haven’t seen this one!

By Stephen Davis · Originally published October 2019 · pp. 25

Betcha haven’t seen this one! By Stephen Davis Special to Civil War News Quick! What’s this view—a photograph taken by one of the Civil War’s most prominent cameramen? Chances are that you’ve seen a slightly different view of this same scene in • Francis Trevelyan Miller’s Photographic Views of the Civil War (1911), vol. 3, p. 135; • Lamont Buchanan, A Pictorial History of the Confederacy (1951), p. 243; • William C. Davis, ed., The Image of War: 1861–1865 (1983), vol. 5, p. 292; or • Jeff L. Rosenheim, Photography and the American Civil War (2013), p. 210. Hint: it’s also in countless histories of the Atlanta Campaign. In the Brig. Gen. Clement Anselm Evans Memorial Research Collection—AKA my personal library at home—I found fifteen books in which the companion photograph has been published. But this one? Nada. We’re fortunate to have found it in the Orlando M. Poe Collection at the U.S. Military Academy, its collection of George N. Barnard photographs. To our knowledge, it’s never been published… …until now, on page 112 of our new book, 100 Significant Photographs of the Civil War: Atlanta Campaign. The page is reproduced below. Editor’s note: we are delighted to announce that America’s Civil War is working with Steve Davis and Jack Melton to publish a dozen of the Barnard photographs shown in our book. The pictorial portfolio is scheduled for the magazine’s January 2020 issue.

A Less Familiar View This Barnard photograph is also at West Point, but it has not been published (so far as we know). The photographer set his camera and tripod so as to emphasize the chimneys of the Atlanta Rolling Mill. Established in 1857, the facility specialized in rolling iron rails for the South’s growing railroad lines. Located beside the Georgia railroad east of downtown, the plant had six big furnaces—five of whose chimneys Barnard captured in this picture. After the war began, the mill turned out armor plate for the South’s ironclad warships. When Sherman’s armies were nearing Atlanta, the mill’s valuable machinery was hauled by train to Columbia, S.C. By July 10, a correspondent for the Montgomery Advertiser reported that “Atlanta has been stripped of public stores and works.” In the night of September 1-2, as Hood’s army abandoned Atlanta, the Georgia militia and Confederate cavalry destroyed the ammunition train and set fire to the nearby mill buildings. After Federal troops entered the city, William Wallace of the 3rd Wisconsin saw “steam boilers, fly wheels, great piles of iron in various stages of manufacture,” but of the mill itself only the chimneys stood. Illinois private Laforest Dunham also saw the wreckage, noticing “lots of plateing for gun boats that they could not get off”—Confederate railroads proved unable to transport the rolling mill’s iron plate to the coastal facilities where the ironclad gunboats were being built.