A Stop Along The Way

I mentioned in a previous post (Back In Bidness) about stopping at the Jackson Ferry Shot Tower, part of New River Trail State Park in Virginia, near the town of Austinville. Here’s a bit more to the story.

We have traveled up I-77 through Virginia dozens, perhaps hundreds of times over the years, and each time we have passed Exit 24, we saw the brown signs denoting ‘New River Trail State Park’ and ‘Shot Tower Historical State Park.’ The shot tower is visible from the road farther north, and it looked like an interesting place. But in all the times we’ve passed it, we never took the time to stop. This time we did.

There really isn’t much to photograph of the tower itself, since the inside was closed and locked and the outside is “just” a tower. But the story of the tower itself is fascinating. It might be worth a revisit on a day when the tower is open, but I’m still not sure what would be visible to photograph.

I had always assumed that the term “shot tower” referred to a former use as a vantage point for firing guns or cannons. In fact, it was a place where shot (think ‘buckshot’) was manufactured. The tower itself is 75 feet tall, but it sits atop a 75 foot deep shaft. Molten lead was poured through screens of varying sizes at the top of the tower, and droplets of this molten lead, in sizes determined by the openings in the screens, would fall to a kettle of water at the bottom. The 150 foot drop was thought to be the distance needed for the drops of lead to form perfect spheres.

A link to a .pdf on the Virginia DCR website is here.

The area around the tower had a few interesting scenes to visit and to photograph. In my previous post I had shared a photo of an old house on an adjacent property. Now that I’ve had a chance to look at all my photographs from that day and process them appropriately, there are a few more to share. And these photos gave me a chance to try out the new “Adaptive B&W” tool in Lightroom. I think the results are pretty good, although I still have a bit to learn about it.