Jackson Ferry Shot Tower
This is a virtual tour of the Jackson Ferry Shot Tower in Austinville. It is one of the few surviving shot towers in the United States designed for making spherical lead shot through what is called the “drop process,” where hot lead is dropped from a great height into a basin of water.
Lead for the shot came from the nearby Chiswell lead mines, a mining venture with a history reaching back before the American Revolution. Land speculator John Chiswell first began to mine for lead on the site, then on Cherokee land, in the 1750s. The Continental Army procured much of its lead from the Chiswell mines. Shot was not yet produced on site, however. The lead was shipped out and hauled in carts along with the Continental Army to be molded into shot as needed.
Around 1790, Connecticut-born land speculator Moses Austin acquired the mines and much of the surrounding area with his brother Stephen. The brothers attempted to turn the mines into a profitable business. They hired skilled workers and built up the surrounding town, which eventually became known as Austinville. While living in Virginia, Moses Austin and his wife had a son they named Stephen Fuller Austin. He would later become well known as the chief colonizer of Texas and the namesake for the city of Austin, Texas.
The Austins were never able to make a profit on the Chiswell mines, and in 1806 they sold them to Thomas Jackson, a skilled worker who had been employed at the mines as a smith. Jackson and his workers constructed the shot tower from stone quarried in a nearby limestone deposit, finishing the project in 1807.
The Jackson Ferry Shot Tower used a method to produce shot patented in 1782 by British inventor William Watts. Watts discovered that by dropping hot lead treated with arsenic from a great height into a kettle of water, one can quickly produce large amounts of perfectly spherical lead shot. Earlier methods of producing drop shot called for dropping hot lead from a short distance into cold water, which would cool and harden the shot, but often in a teardrop shape with a tail. Watts’ innovation was that by dropping the shot from a tall height, the shot would harden before it hit the water, keeping its perfect spherical shape. The 150-foot drop of the Jackson Ferry Shot Tower is ideal for this style of production. This method of producing lead shot is still in use today.
The Shot Tower stands seventy-five feet high over a lower shaft that descends another seventy-five feet to river level. The walls are two and a half feet thick, which helped to regulate the temperature of the hot lead as it fell into a large kettle of water at the bottom. Workers, probably a mix of enslaved and free, would hoist the lead to the top of the tower where it would be heated in a large kettle by a furnace. Workers would treat the lead with arsenic, heat it to the correct consistency, and then pour it through sieves, which could be used to produce shot of varying sizes. The shot would drop 150 feet into the kettle of water, where it would be retrieved by workers, dried, and polished with graphite to prepare for sale.
The Jackson Ferry Shot tower was the first factory to mass-produce shot in this fashion in the United States. It remained in operation from 1807 to 1839. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers designated the Shot Tower a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark in 1981, and the site is now managed as a part of New River Trail State Park.
