Battle of Asheville, April Eighteen Sixty-Five
North Carolina
In the closing days of the Civil War, a Union cavalry raid aimed at Asheville ended in a surprising Confederate victory. On April third, eighteen sixty-five, Union Colonel Isaac Kirby departed East Tennessee with about nine hundred men on a mission to capture or destroy the mountain town. Three days later, on April sixth, Kirby's force ran into local Confederate militia commanded by Colonel G.
W. Clayton and was turned back. The defeat came just three days before Lee surrendered at Appomattox.
Earthworks from the battle remain visible one hundred yards north of this marker, one of the few places in the Southern mountains where you can still walk ground where men held a defensive line in the war's final week. Asheville was one of the last Southern towns to resist Union forces before the Confederacy collapsed entirely.
