The Tallassee Armory Guards, Camp 1921 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans are recreating two local battles of the Civil War.
The 26th Annual Bill Anthony Memorial Battles for the Armory takes visitors back to 1864 and nearby skirmishes in Chehaw and Franklin. The reenactments show life of Confederate and Union soldiers late in the war. Tallassee Armory Guards commander Fred Randall Hughey said the Union Army was looking for Tallassee and its armory.
“Union raiders came down late in the war with instructions to destroy any kind of mills and manufacturing of armament the Confederates could continue to supply troops with,” Hughey said. “They had instructions to find and destroy the armory.”
Hughey said the armory was valuable because the Confederate government had ordered the move from Richmond the tooling for making a cavalry rifle. It became known as the Tallassee Carbine.
Hughey said it was a short barrelled rifle with a hinged-ramrod to allow the muzzleloader rifle to be reloaded from horseback. It was built in a way the ramrod couldn’t be easily removed. Some 500 of the rifles were built in Tallassee. They, along with the tooling, were ordered to be moved to Macon where their train was intercepted by the Union. Hughey said only 12 of the Tallassee Carbines are known to have survived.
“They were destroyed,” Hughey said of the guns. “They were likely thrown in a river or burned in a bonfire.”
The two skirmishes were in search of the armory before it was ordered moved from Tallassee.
Hughey said the first group of Union soldiers to come searching for it was Rousseau's Raiders.
“They got turned back by a group of local militia down at Chehaw Station,” Hughey said. “It is down near Tuskegee. Some cadets from the University of Alabama who had been training in Selma arrived by railroad and got into the battle too.”
Hughey said the Union came out on top of the skirmish but decided to move on into Georgia.
Local militia encountered Wilson’s Raiders near Franklin next. The group of Union soldiers had started in north Alabama and made their way to Selma before searching for Tallassee.
But the soldiers never found Tallasseee.
According to Hughey, the Union map had Tallassee on the east of the Tallapoosa River. He said the Native American village was there but the manufacturing hub of Tallassee first on the west side of the river.
The Union soldiers also moved to Georgia as Confederate Gen. Nathan B. Forrest was nearby.
The Battles for the Armory are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday with the Confederates winning one battle and the Union the other. Reactors will be dressed in period dress with muzzleloader rifles and cannons all firing. The battles are just south of Tallassee in Elmore County on Rifle Range Road. Admission is $10.
The battles are not the only thing happening. Hughey suggested getting there earlier to see and sample Southern food, sutlers and vendors with period gifts. In the village, the life of soldiers in a camp during the Civil War can be seen as are demonstrations of a field hospital at the time.
“There is plenty to see and do,” Hughey said.