Shot Towers: A Strange but Necessary Bit of History

If you lived in the United States in the nineteenth century, the need for hunting and defending yourself and your family from predators meant that you required a ready supply of ammunition for your guns and rifles. The forests and the prairies were your grocery stores. If you had the materials, skills, space, and time, you could make enough bullets for your personal use, but there was also ongoing conflict between indigenous people and sprawling American settlers, and there were wars and other military skirmishes creating continuous demand for gun shot. There was, however, an inherent problem with the way gun shot was created.

Prior to the late eighteenth century, gun shot was made by melting lead and placing the liquid in molds. However, the shot that came from the molds was most often dimpled and scratched and had flat spots and seams. The irregularly shaped shot led to very inaccurate shooting. A British plumber named William Watts noticed that raindrops fell in perfect spheres. He wondered if dropping lead from a height might make it imitate the shape of the rain. So he actually built a tower onto the top of his house, cut holes in his floors, and dug a well in his cellar to test his theory. As you can see in the photo on the left, he wound up with a structure about six stories tall from which he dropped molten lead mixed with a bit of arsenic to smooth it. Sure enough, as the lead fell, it began to solidify, and the water at the bottom not only cushioned the fall but hardened the lead balls without imperfections. Mr. Watts received a patent for his invention in 1782, and just a few years later, the first shot tower went up in London. Within a few years, more spread throughout Europe.

(Above: William Watt's shot tower, Redcliff, Bristol, England. Photo taken shortly before the structure was demolished in 1968, from Wikimedia Commons, photo by Martin Tester, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80086999)

How Did Shot Towers Work?

Lead was melted at the top of a tower and poured into sieves that had different size holes, depending on what was being made. The lead fell into water at the bottom of the tower where the balls cooled off and then were separated, polished, and sorted by size. Towers varied widely in how tall and wide they were, and sorting and separating techniques varied as well.

How Did Shot Towers Come to America?

During colonial times, all ammunition needed in the new world for large-scale use came here from Europe and was easily available. There was no need for shot towers in the United States until 1807, when Congress passed the Embargo Act which froze international trade in the hopes that England and France would recognize the United States as an equal commercial partner. Within a year, the first shot towers appeared in Philadelphia and in Wytheville, Virginia, and they became essential in producing ammunition for the War of 1812. Many more shot towers sprang up throughout the country during the next two centuries, and, in fact, many remained operational well into the twentieth century. Most shot towers are gone, but a few still stand. (See the list below.) None are in use anymore.

The Shot Tower Company in St. Louis

There was a shot tower in St. Louis and, according to historian and archivist, Chris Naffziger, it was owned by a man named Luther Kennett. Known as the St. Louis Shot Tower Company, it was located on the riverfront about where the Cotton Belt Freight Depot is now, just east of North 1st Street between Florida and Dickson Streets. (Read more and see an illustration in Chris's blog at https://stlouispatina.com/st-louis-shot-tower-company/.) 

The graphic to the right depicts a cloth bag from about 1850 that would have been filled with “B” shot and shows what the St. Louis shot tower looked like. According to WorthPoint, a website on which this artifact was recently for sale, Ferdinand Kennett, his brother Luther, and a third partner, James White, had a thriving business. By 1836, their company had purchased the J. H. Alford Company and its warehouse and another shot tower in Herculaneum, and by 1840, they had entered into a second partnership with John Latty “to make shot and form a new company, F. Kennett & Company.” They also had Kennett, Simonds, and Company at 24 Water Street in St. Louis in 1849. The St. Louis Shot Tower Company “supplied large quantities of lead shot, trade balls, and small lead bars to the frontier.” The website says that lead bars from the St. Louis Shot Tower Company have been found in what is today Nebraska, Wyoming, and Colorado. (Read more at https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/st-louis-shot-tower-co-patent-shot-1801303022)

So, as you travel this summer, keep an eye out for existing shot towers, if your travels take you to:

• Baltimore
• Philadelphia
• Kings Mills, Ohio
• Bridgeport or New Haven, Connecticut
• Dubuque, Iowa
• Wytheville, Virginia
• Spring Green, Wisconsin

Even if you aren’t lucky enough to see one in person, you might want to reflect on this odd bit of history that surely affected the lives of many of our ancestors.

More Information

"History of the American Shot Tower" https://www.minnesotatrap.com/history-in-the-making/shot-towers-page-1.htm