Gun Cap Factory
Fredericksburg, Gillespie County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In the Civil War, at this site, E. Krauskoff, gunsmith, and Adolph Lungkwitz, silversmith, made gun caps. Inventing machinery, they rolled copper thin and cut it to cap-size pieces. Saltpetre and quicksilver went into the caps, to detonate rifle and pistol ammunition. Saltpetre came from nearby bat caves. Quicksilver and copper had to be brought through neutral Mexico or the coastal blockade. Rifles, cannon, gunpowder and pistols were made at Austin, Houston, Bastrop, Waxahachie, san Antonio, corpus Christi, Burnet, Lancaster, Rusk and Tyler.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Cut off from Northern factories by war, the Confederacy improvised its arms wherever it could—including this Fredericksburg workshop, where gunsmith E. Krauskoff and silversmith Adolph Lungkwitz built machinery to roll copper thin and stamp out percussion caps. They charged the caps with saltpetre from nearby bat caves and quicksilver smuggled through Mexico or past the coastal blockade. Their tiny caps fed rifles and pistols made in a scatter of Texas towns across the interior.
Why it matters
Small backcountry shops like this reveal how the Confederate war effort depended on scarce raw materials and homemade ingenuity, and how deeply the Civil War reached into remote frontier communities.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Civil War landed hard on the Texas Hill Country, and in an unusually complicated way. This was a region settled largely by German immigrants, and its loyalties were genuinely divided — many of these settlers held strong Union sympathies, and the war years brought martial law, suspicion, and real violence to the area. It was not a simple place to be during the conflict.
It was also a region cut off from the industrial North that had made most of America's manufactured goods. When war severed those supply lines, the interior of Texas had to improvise nearly everything, from cloth to weapons, out of whatever it could find or make.
Against that backdrop — isolation, scarcity, and improvisation — a small workshop in Fredericksburg turned itself to one of the war's most unglamorous but essential problems: how to make an army's guns actually fire.
People & events
At this site, two skilled craftsmen took on that problem. E. Krauskoff, a gunsmith, and Adolph Lungkwitz, a silversmith, set out to manufacture percussion caps — the small metal cups that made mid-19th-century rifles and pistols fire.
The work was as much invention as manufacture. With no factory to supply them, they built their own machinery: tools to roll copper thin enough and to cut it into tiny cap-sized pieces. Into each cap went saltpetre and quicksilver, the volatile charge that, struck by a hammer, would detonate a weapon's load.
The raw materials tell their own war story. The saltpetre came from bat caves in the surrounding country — a genuinely local resource, harvested from the Hill Country itself. But copper and quicksilver had to be brought in the hard way, smuggled through neutral Mexico or run past the coastal blockade that was strangling Southern supply. Their caps, once made, fed weapons produced in a scattering of Texas towns across the state's interior.
Its place in the American story
We tend to remember the Civil War through its great battles and famous generals, but wars are won and lost on supply — on whether the small, dull, necessary things exist in enough quantity. A rifle without a percussion cap is just an expensive club. This workshop existed because that unglamorous truth reached all the way into the Texas frontier.
The story here is the story of a whole society improvising under blockade. Denied Northern factories, the South had to conjure its war materials from scratch, and that meant clever people in unlikely places building machines to make things they'd never had to make before. A gunsmith and a silversmith rolling their own copper in a Hill Country town is that national predicament in miniature.
It also shows how far the war reached. This was not a battlefield, but the conflict pressed on it anyway — pulling saltpetre from local caves, sending men across the Mexican border for copper, and turning quiet artisans into munitions makers. Few sites capture so plainly how total the war became, and how deeply it penetrated even remote communities.
If you visit
Come here for the story rather than the spectacle. This marker records what happened at this site, so let it work on your imagination rather than expecting a preserved factory to tour.
Stand for a moment and picture the ingenuity of it: two tradesmen, cut off from the wider world, designing machinery to roll copper paper-thin and stamp out caps no bigger than a fingertip. Think about the sheer effort behind each ingredient — the saltpetre gathered from bat caves in the surrounding hills, the copper and quicksilver carried through Mexico or slipped past the blockade.
It fits naturally into a Fredericksburg visit as a change of key. Amid the town's tidy limestone homes and shops, this spot reminds you that the Civil War touched even here, and that some of its most vital work was done not on famous fields but in small workshops by resourceful, anonymous hands.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · E. Krauskoff
- · Adolph Lungkwitz
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Meckel-Hanus Building
Fredericksburg, TX
Saddle and harness merchant Henry Meckel bought this Fredericksburg property in 1886 and improved a stone house already on the lot dating to around 1860, adding a second level of concrete blocks and a double gallery of milled wood. In 1927 Dr. J. J. Hanus purchased the building for a hospital and reworked its facade to the look it wears today. It later served as a Catholic convent from 1949 to 1979 before being restored in 1985.
Hoerster Building
Fredericksburg, TX
Built around 1900 for J. A. Hoerster, this limestone Victorian commercial building has anchored a Fredericksburg streetscape for over a century, later held by the Wieser family for more than fifty years. Its narrow storefront columns and bracketed second-floor balcony framed a rotating cast of tenants—retail stores, a barber, a dentist, even city offices. It stands as a well-preserved example of small-town Main Street commerce.
Albert Lee Patton Building
Fredericksburg, TX
Missouri-born tinsmith Albert Lee Patton settled in Fredericksburg in the early 1870s and in 1897 built this two-story native limestone building beside his mercantile and hardware store. Its ground floor housed the Citizens Bank until the institution closed in 1932, while Patton, his wife Emma, and their five children lived above. The building is a durable emblem of Hill Country commerce.
Schwarz Building
Fredericksburg, TX
Built of local limestone in 1907 by merchant Charles Schwarz and his wife Mary, this Fredericksburg building followed the practical Hill Country pattern of a store below and family living quarters above. Its ground floor held Schwarz's general merchandise and dry goods store, and over the years it also sheltered youth groups and a veterans' organization.