Battle of Sulphur Creek Trestle

These quiet fields north of Athens hide one of the costliest small battles in Alabama. A wooden railroad trestle here carried the Nashville and Decatur line, the supply artery feeding General Sherman's march on Atlanta. In late September of eighteen sixty-four, Confederate cavalry under Nathan Bedford Forrest swept into the valley and ringed the fort with artillery on the high ground above it.

Inside the works stood Union men of the Third Tennessee Cavalry, the Ninth Indiana Cavalry, and the One Hundred Eleventh United States Colored Troops, Black soldiers fighting for the Union. After about five hours of bombardment, the garrison commander surrendered. Roughly two hundred federal soldiers lay dead, and some eight hundred were taken prisoner. Forrest's men burned the blockhouses and the trestle to the ground, cutting the railroad that fed the Union war effort.