Wilson's Headquarters and Camp Winter, 1865

In the winter of eighteen sixty-five this quiet stretch of Lauderdale County held a huge Union cavalry force. Here at Gravelly Springs, Major General James Harrison Wilson gathered his cavalry, well over ten thousand men, their tents stretching westward to Waterloo. Wilson made his headquarters about a mile east of the springs, at a nearby plantation house.

From mid January to mid March his troopers drilled and waited. Then, on the twenty-second of March, they swept south on what became Wilson's Raid, the last great Union cavalry campaign of the war. They burned the University of Alabama, captured the iron works at Selma, and rode on toward Georgia, where weeks later Confederate President Jefferson Davis was taken prisoner.