Cook & Brother Armory Earthworks

Cook and Brother Armory Earthworks. . Following the capture of New Orleans by Union forces in the spring of 1862, armory operators Ferdinand and Francis Cook fled east, first to Selma, Alabama, and then to Athens, Georgia, where they found safe haven and resumed their manufacture of weapons for the Confederacy. The two brothers built the Cook and Brother Armory nearby on the bank of the North Oconee River and began operations on Christmas Day in 1862, producing prized Enfield rifles for the war., The Cooks intended the armory, which originally featured a crenellated tower at its entrance, as a last line of defense for the city. The armory was surrounded on all sides by breastworks, earthen structures behind which soldiers could safely shelter while firing. Two gun emplacements were also constructed on hills overlooking the armory and the city. One was located here, and the other at Carr's Hill, to the south., To defend the armory, the Cook Brothers assembled their employees into the 23rd Battalion of Georgia Volunteers. Ferdinand served as Major in command of the unit, and his brother Francis as Captain. In addition to the manufacture of rifles, daily drills were carried out by the soldier-employees, among them transferring a single cannon, obtained from the Augusta Arsenal, between the two hilltop gun emplacements., The nearest engagement during the Civil War was several miles south of Athens, at Barber Creek, where local reservists and militiamen successfully repelled a Union raiding party. The Cooks' last line of defense was never tested, and this hilltop gun emplacement remains unconquered, though time and urban development have erased the other hilltop site and the breastworks surrounding the Armory.