One of the advantages of Encyclopedia Virginia being digital is that we can illustrate our entries with interactive media. We use Google technology to create tours of historic locations in Virginia so that our users can virtually step into the places we talk about in our entries. Right now, EV features 90 virtual tours, and that number is constantly growing. As media editor, my work usually begins at the end of the process—I look at the finished product and write the caption. This June, however, I was able to tag along and learn how these tours are made.
That’s how I found myself carefully maneuvering a camera bag up the steep (steep!) steps of the historic Jackson Ferry Shot Tower in Austinville with my coworkers Peter and Julia. The height of the tower didn’t bother me, although I did get spooked by the dried-up corpses of a few unfortunate wolf spiders sprinkled throughout the space. We were touring in the off season, and park rangers had not yet had a chance to tidy up.
The shot tower is a fascinating historic site. Standing seventy-five feet high, it is clearly visible from I-77, looming over the bank of the New River. Directly beneath the tower a shaft drops down another seventy-five feet to river level. From 1807 to 1839 it produced lead shot (mostly tiny “fowling shot”) for shotguns.
A proximity to dead spiders would have been the least of the worries of the shot tower workers. In the top room of the tower a blazing furnace heated a large kettle to the required temperature to melt lead. Workers, probably a mix of enslaved and free, used a pulley system to hoist the heavy metal to the top room of the tower. It would be sweltering hot inside, the two and half feet thick limestone walls of the tower were designed purposefully to insulate the interior so the shot wouldn’t cool too quickly on its fall.
Workers smelted the lead and added arsenic to make the metal more pliable and easier to pour. Once the treated lead had reached the correct consistency, workers poured the hot metal through sieves, comparable to big pasta strainers. Different-sized holes in the sieves created different-sized shot. The hot metal then fell 150 feet down into a kettle filled with water, forming, raindrop-like, into perfect spheres. The water at the bottom did not cool the lead; its function was to cushion the shot and prevent it from losing its shape. Finally, workers would retrieve the shot, dry it, polish it with graphite, and prepare it for sale.
On my visit, the thick walls of the tower kept the interior nicely cool on a hot day, and we were able to set up our tripod and collect the 360-degree digital photographs from each corner of the room with no risk of life or limb. The view of New River from the top of the tower was impressive, and the walk down to the base (where a now-closed access tunnel would have led workers to the kettle at the base of the shaft) is part of the scenic New River Trail. Our virtual tour of the Jackson Ferry Shot Tower can’t capture all of the experience, but it can give you a hint of what it feels like in the space. I hope you are able to check it out, maybe even visit Shot Tower State Park yourself, and look into our other virtual tours.
