The Cursed Silk Dress Balloons 32.078098° -81.082878°

Hey, Everyone!

Today I’m going to tell you about a rather fashionable weapon of war…

I have a story about the Confederate Air Corps… and their airships made from silk dresses… Or so the legend goes.

It is a tragic and twisted story from the beginning all the way to the very sad end. These balloons seemed to be tinged by a curse.     

It was back in 1862 in a pre-dawn light when Savannah gas plant supervisor James Smedberg braced himself against the wall of a brick well to shut off… as he called it… an “intolerable gas flow” and found his hand resting on the still lifeless face of a man suspended on the side of the pit where the valve was located.

Smedberg said the man was hanging by the jaws, between a flange on one side and the brickwork on the other.

Two men were dead, another lay at the bottom of a twenty-four-foot dry well used for running gas and oil pipes for the facility.

Around the spot, other plant workers staggered and fell across the work yard like drunken chickens around a barnyard moonshine tank.

Nearby a short rope held the partially inflated Gazelle, an experimental Confederate observation balloon tied to a winch that was staked to the ground of the gasworks terrace.

The day was supposed to be a festive occasion with bleachers for military and city bigwigs, but then all hell broke loose.

I’m JD Byous. Welcome to History By GPS, where you travel through history and culture GPS location by GPS location.

Remember, the other GPS locations mentioned in this story can be found on HistoryByGPS.COM or on the show notes of your podcast provider… Apple, Google Podcast… and others.

This is part of three interesting historical events that happened years apart at this exact location… which is…

32.078098° -81.082878°.

The other two episodes were the Don’t Tax Me Bro story and the Yankee in the Garden episode. So, check them out if you haven’t. You’ll hear about this guy, Smedberg mentioned in one of them.

Okay, back to the balloon that had a gas problem…

And at my age… boy, I know the feeling.

Now, I will tell you that I had come across this story… about the Confederate balloon… in my studies about the American Civil War. And I will tell you that I am not a scholar of that war by any means. I am a scholar of the places I lived and how things like the Revolutionary and Civil War affected them.

But this incident came to my attention almost by accident. When I was going through old newspaper accounts of things that happened at the area in Savannah called Trustees’ Garden I came across a one or two sentence notice in a Richmond, Virginia newspaper that said that on May 29 1862 two men died in an accident at the Savannah gas works.

So I set it aside and pretty much forgot about it.

Later, I was researching the Savannah gas works and found an article written by James Smedberg about how it was necessary to use pine wood to make gas because of the scarcity of coal during the war. In it he talked about the deaths and that it happened when they were inflating a balloon for the military.

It became evident that the only balloon possible was the first gas balloon built by the Confederate Army to use to spy on Union forces.

Okay, back to business… I imagine that a gas leak was evident when Superintendent Smedberg arrived at the Savannah gasworks just before sunrise at 4 o’clock on that May 29 morning.

He must have smelled smell the fumes before he stepped onto the property.

See, coal and wood gas give off a putrid odor like the oil used in the cracks of sidewalks or creosote piers and telephone poles. It’s unlike today’s odorless natural gas, which needs the added chemical mercaptan to give a scent to escaping fumes.

Gas retort ovens for cooking coal or