| Jacob(#756) and Francis Marion Kinser (#004)and
several other men made saltpeter during the Civil War in a huge cave
located near the family farm in Monroe County, Tennessee.
In the late spring of 1861, Tennessee voted to secede
from the Union and a conscript law was put in force. The Confederate
government was badly in need of saltpeter (sodium nitrate), an important
element in the black powder used at that time. Saltpeter is distilled from
bat guano found in abundance in the limestone caves of East Tennessee.
Hicks was assigned, with three other men, to form a group which would
operate under the supervision of the Enrolling Officer, Abraham Stakely.
They erected mining works for the production of
saltpeter at Craighead cave four miles south of Sweetwater, Tennessee. The
cave is presently a tourist attraction advertised as the Lost Sea.
Others who worked there were: Rev. G. H. Coltharp, Captain of the group,
W.M. Lee, A.L. McKehen, Jacob Kinser, F. Marion Kinser, John
Wilson, Thomas Forkner, John Gallagher, Connor Bellamy, and McKinney
Walker.
Charles Hicks described the layout, "The opening to
the cave is near the top on the steep north side of a red knob, and
descends on a steep incline requiring steps about fifty yards southwest,
then turns southeast running down about one hundred and fifty yards to the
main room of the cave. This is said to be the largest known underground
room in the world, about two hundred and fifty yards long, eighty wide and
so high that a good thrower cannot hit the roof at the highest places.
Other rooms branch off from this one, most of them not very extensive. One
running southwest about half a mile ends in a pool of water which
obstructs further progress.
We ran heavy wires down into the cave with
carriers for half bushel buckets and a wheel and cord at the top and at
the two angles and going some distance along the cave. This for hauling
out the earth and it worked well. From the mouth of the cave we made a
plank shute down the hill to the head of a hollow about one hundred yards.
We tried running the dirt down the shute without
covering it, but the lumps got up so much speed that they jumped out so
badly that we put a cover on it. We made hoppers holding fifty bushels,
ten for dirt and one for ashes, of four foot boards set in troughs, like
old fashioned ashhoppers. Close by we put up a furnace with four kettles,
two of fifty and two of seventy-five gallons capacity each.
It was necessary to have a large amount of water
to leach the earth and ashes. This we got from a spring about eighty yards
further down the hollow, by erecting a scaffold and pump thirty feet high
and running troughs on scaffolds up to the hoppers. Pumping proved to be
the hardest and most disagreeable work in the whole business. It took
about two hours to raise enough water for a day. We took turns day round
at pumping. The lye from the dirt was calcium or lime nitrate, had a
sweetish taste and was poisonous. We had to keep the works fenced against
cattle. Somebody left the fence down one night, a calf went in, drank and
died in a few hours. We paid for it.
The nitre lye was boiled from early morning until
about three o'clock in the evening, being dipped from the upper kettles to
the lower ones as it became stronger, then it was lifted from the lowest
kettle to a large trough where potash lye was mixed in until it ceased to
make a white cloud of precipitate. In the course of an hour the
precipitate settled to the bottom in a mushy lime, leaving the liquid
clear. We then had a solution of potassium nitrate, the nitrogen having
stronger chemical affinity for the potassium than the calcium, let to the
lime and took the potash into combination.
This solution was drawn off carefully into the
kettle again and boiled down until a drop on a cold ax hardened and looked
like a drop of paraffin. It was then thrown into a deep, narrow trough to
"shoot". Next morning nearly the whole of it would be a mass of
needlelike crystals shooting in every direction in the trough.
When drained and dried this was commercial
saltpetre. As I now remember, we made about fifty pounds daily, and were
paid seventy-five cents per pound in confederate money for it.
We camped at the works and worked regularly from
Monday morning to Saturday evening, sometimes until dark. When we went
home, we left someone to protect the works and keep the lye from running
over the troughs and wasting."
The saltpeter they manufactured was combined with sulfur
and charcoal to make black powder. The mining was abandoned and equipment
dismantled when the Union Army moved into the area.
Francis Marion's
initials are still visible on the ceiling of the cave, apparently written
there with candle smoke.
Another Francis Marion Kinzer, a distant cousin, from middle Tennessee was
in the Second Tennessee Cavalry Division that fought at the battle of
Chickamauga. | 