Black Powder

	Kinser, Kinzer, Kincer, Kinsar, Kinsor Kintzer, Künzer, Kuentzer, Küntzer One Immigrant Family

Black Powder

    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.