on the James River in 1815. In 1816, the first City Hall was built. Industrial revolution In the 1830s, the Industrial Revolution arrived in Richmond. In 1831, the Chesterfield Railroad Company opened its horse-drawn rail line between Manchester and the Chesterfield coal mines, just south of the city. In 1833, Rhys Davies, an engineer from Tredegar, South Wales, was hired by Richmond businessmen and industrialists to construct furnaces and rolling mills used in the iron and foundry business. By 1837 the rolling mills were merged with the Virginia Foundry, creating Tredegar Iron Works, the largest foundry in the South and the third-largest in the United States. The first steam locomotive service to the city began with the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad in 1836. Other railroads followed: the Richmond and Danville Railroad was chartered in 1847, and completed the circuit to Danville, Virginia by 1854. In 1838, the Medical College of Virginia was founded in the city. Besides transportation and industry, antebellum Richmond was also the center of regional communications, with several newspapers and book publishers, including John Warrock, helping shape public opinion and further the education of the populace. The aversion to the slave trade was growing by the mid-19th century, and in 1848, Henry "Box" Brown made history by having himself nailed into a small box and shipped from Richmond to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, escaping slavery to the land of freedom. 1861–1865: The Civil War In February 1861, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as President of the Confederate States of America in Montgomery, Alabama. Two months after Davis' inauguration, the Confederate army fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, and the Civil War had begun. With the outbreak of war, followed by Virginia's secession in May 1861, the strategic location of the Tredegar Iron Works was one of the primary factors in the decision to relocate the capital of the Confederacy to Richmond. From this arsenal came much of the Confederates' heavy ordnance machinery, making 723 tons of armor plating that covered the CSS Virginia, the world's first ironclad used in the two-day Battle of Hampton Roads in March 1862, against the USS Monitor. In 1862, the Peninsula Campaign, led by General George B. McClellan, was a Union attempt to take Richmond, beginning from Union-held Fort Monroe at the eastern tip of the Virginia Peninsula at Old Point Comfort. Efforts to take Richmond by the James River were successfully