The Hazard Powder Company of Hazardville, Connecticut was in business from the mid-1830's to the time the entire plant blew up in January of 1913.
The Hazard Powder Company supplied approximately 40% of all the powder used by the Union Army 1861-65. Most of it was used to make small arms ammunition because DuPont powder (DuPont supplied another 40% of the gunpowder used by the Union) was earmarked for the Union artillery.
The owner of the Hazard Powder Company, a Colonel Hazard, was A COLONEL IN THE GEORGIA MILITIA! He had lived in Savannah, GA many years before the outbreak of the Civil War and was very pro-Southern. He had been commissioned in the Georgia Militia and was very proud of the rank. He even kept the title after he moved back home to Connecticut to run the powder works.
In early 1861 Colonel Hazard sold 80,000 pounds of Hazard Cannon Powder to the State of South Carolina which used much of it for the bombardment of Fort Sumter!
The finest gunpowder made during the war was made at the Confederate Powder Works in Augusta, GA. The plant extended for two miles along the Augusta Canal and was copied from the British Government's plant at Waltham Abbey in England.
One of the reasons that the Augusta gunpowder was so superior was that the charcoal that was used in it came from branches of Black Willow trees that grew along the banks of the Savannah River.
After the war, captured lots of Augusta powder was tested at Fortress Monroe by Ordnance Department officers and found to be a superior powder.
In August of 1945, the USAAF B-29 "Enola Gay" dropped the world's first nuclear weapon, an Atom Bomb, of the Japanese City of Hiroshima, Japan. The trigger mechanism of that Atomic Bomb used Black Powder!
Modern GOEX powder used charcoal made from maple trees, at least until the plant moved from Pennsylvania.
GOEX is the only company in the United States that still produces black powder. The vast majority of the black powder made by GOEX goes to the military-not Skirmishers and other civilian black powder shooters.
GOEX was purchased by the Hodgdon Powder Company in 2009. Hodgdon also produces the "substitute black powder" Pyrodex at another plant.
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