Existing comment:
Ironworks Oil House:
This stone storage shed was built to hold flammable lubricants and dangerous acids. The hand-cut stone likely was quarried here on Belle Isle. The shed served the Old Dominion Iron and Nail Company, which expanded from this area eastward, behind you, late in the 19th century. An 1886 fire insurance map identified the shed as an "oil house" and showed a "laboratory" next to it. The oil house may have been constructed by 1876, when another map showed a similar building in about this location.
Notice the earth piled around the shed's side walls. The earth once reached to within two feet of the roof. The thick stone walls, reinforced by the heaped earth, would have helped direct any explosion and fire upward rather than outward, to protect other buildings as well as the workers here.
When the 1934 Robert E Lee Bridge was demolished after the new bridge was completed in 1988, the shed's heavy slate roof was removed. The walls were temporarily buried under thirty feet of sand to protect them from any falling debris. |