According to Thomas P. Clinton, the Leach and Avery foundry, in Tuskaloosa County, near the town of Tuskaloosa, started business in the eighteen-forties, and during the Civil War cast a considerable amount of cannon for the Confederacy.
The old Tannehill furnace was bought in 1863 by William L. Saunders and Company, of Marion, Alabama. A steam engine was installed and another furnace added to the plant.

On the same creek, precisely one mile south of Tannehill, a forge was put up by Thomas Hennington Owen, and Thomas Lightfoot Williams. "Over and again, so Rose Owen tells me, they had to get out their ore in the morning, and besides making the iron for the government, they had to make the nails and horseshoes, shoe all their mules, and get the teams off to the railroad at Montevallo, before night."1 Mr. Williams also ran a big tan yard at Tannehill, and made saddles and harness for the Confederacy. The forge, being out of the way, escaped the enemy's eye, but was destroyed in the June freshet of 1866. Mr. Owen was not an iron worker himself, but a planter and merchant of Jefferson County, and served in the latter eighteen-seventies as county commissioner. He employed an expert iron worker from Tennessee, Thomas C. Bratton, to build and operate the forge.

All during the war Tannehill furnace was operated, making cannon balls, gun barrels, ordnance, all the munitions of war, in addition to pots, pans, and skillets, for the use of the Confederate army. When Croxton's detachment came through Roupes Valley they happened upon Tannehill at the very moment when the cupola was being tapped and they made short work of it. They demolished one furnace entirely, blew up the trestle, tore up the tramway, burned the foundry and cast houses, and passed on to the settlement beyond, which they razed to the ground.
This was the death blow. The Tannehill furnaces were put out of blast for good and all; the whole country round about was abandoned and the forest left to its own. And the forest took! It is wild almost as a virgin wilderness to-day down there. The old Mansion House, a short distance from the furnace, where Giles Edwards afterwards lived, is gone to rack and ruin. A few heaps of stone mark the site of the forsaken homes. The ruins of the furnace like some Welsh medieval tower stand forlorn, yet will they stand for centuries to come as a memorial to the early iron-masters of Alabama, as the mute historian of the first generation of the iron industry in this State.

There is no written record of any of the facts about Tannehill, and no mention whatever is made of this important group of furnaces in the standard authorities on iron making in Alabama. The Station Tannehill is the getting-off place for the Goethite miners now — nothing else. No hint or suggestion of the old furnaces, or of the early Tannehill settlement, can be seen from the railroad which cuts through the wild country.