From the Richmond Examiner, 12/16/1863, p. 1

FALL OF RUINS – NARROW ESCAPE FROM DEATH. – Monday afternoon the walls of the Crenshaw Woolen Company’s mill, left standing since the fire which destroyed the mill and a portion of the Tredegar Works last spring, gave way, without any premonitory symptoms, and came down, the whole of its seven stories, with a crash like unto thunder. By an interposition, which may be esteemed almost providential, a few falling bricks that preceded the general crash, rattling upon the roof, gave timely warning to the workmen in the foundry and shops below, and they had time to escape from the buildings before the tons of brick and timber came crashing through the roof of the foundry, destroying the furnace and forges at which the men had been at work a moment before, and scattering utter wreck and ruin around. A shed shop on the opposite side was also crushed down, but here, too, the workmen had escaped, and no person was injured.

The fall of the ruins will entail a loss from $5,000 to $10,000 upon Messrs. Joseph R. Anderson & Co., the proprietors of the Tredegar Works. Mr. Anderson had purchased the site of the mill ruins from the Messrs. Crenshaw, and had designed pulling down several stories of it as a precaution against its fall. The large iron bridge connecting the mill with the street fell with the mill.

At Camp Winder, a frame structure, in course of erection for the Confederate States Government, in dimension forty feet by one hundred and sixty feet, was blown down by the wind that prevailed at that time, and five persons therein more or less injured. William Yeatman, the foreman on the building, received a severe cut on the head and bruises on the legs; Mathew, slave of Dr. Charles Rains, of Farmville, had his skull fractured, and slaves of James Eppes and Dr. Layne were quite severely injured about the limbs. Messrs. Green & Allen are the contractors for the building, and their loss is several thousand dollars by the breakage of timbers, &c.

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