Parrott Years and The Civil War
In 1835, Captain Robert Parker Parrott, a West Point graduate, was appointed inspector of ordnance from the foundry. The next year, he resigned his commission and on October 31, 1836 was appointed superintendent of the foundry. It prospered under his tenure, and was the site of numerous experiments with artillery and projectiles, culminating in his invention of the Parrott rifle in 1860. During Parott's tenure, in 1843, the foundry also manufactured USS Spencer, a revenue cutter which was the first iron ship built in the U.S.
The foundry's operations peaked during the Civil War due to military orders: it had a workforce of 1,400 people and produced 2,000 cannon and three million shells. Parrott also invented an incendiary shell which was used in an 8-inch Parrott rifle (the "Swamp Angel") to bombard Charleston. The importance of the foundry to the war effort can be measured by the fact that President Abraham Lincoln visited and inspected it in June 1862.
The fame of the foundry was such that Jules Verne, in his novel From the Earth to the Moon, chose it as the contractor for the Columbiad spaceship-launching cannon.
Read more about this topic: West Point Foundry
Famous quotes containing the words civil war, parrott, years, civil and/or war:
“During the Civil War the area became a refuge for service- dodging Texans, and gangs of bushwhackers, as they were called, hid in its fastnesses. Conscript details of the Confederate Army hunted the fugitives and occasional skirmishes resulted.”
—Administration in the State of Texa, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“I know an Englishman,
Being flattered, is a lamb; threatened, a lion.”
—George Chapman c. 1559–1634, British dramatist, poet, translator. repr. In Plays and Poems of George Chapman: The Tragedies, ed. Thomas Marc Parrott (1910)
“Every constitution..., and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years [a generation]. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries in a thousand years have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover in their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rime;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)