Battle of South Mills

On April nineteenth, eighteen sixty-two, about nine hundred Confederate soldiers commanded by Colonel Ambrose Wright held off three thousand Union troops under General Jesse Reno in a fight here at South Mills in Camden County. The Union mission was specific and urgent: blow up the locks of the Dismal Swamp Canal, three miles to the northwest, to prevent Confederate ironclad gunboats from using the waterway to move south from Norfolk. The Confederates lost twenty-eight men, killed, wounded, or captured.

Union casualties numbered one hundred twenty-seven. But the locks held. The canal remained intact for the rest of the war.

South Mills was one of the few Confederate successes during the broader Burnside Expedition that had been rolling through eastern North Carolina that spring, and its outcome left a strategically important waterway in Southern hands.