Fort Branch: Guardian of the Roanoke

Three miles northeast of here, on a seventy-foot bluff above a bend in the Roanoke River called Rainbow Banks, Confederate engineers built one of the South's best-preserved earthwork forts. Construction began in late eighteen sixty-two, and by March of eighteen sixty-three Fort Branch mounted about a dozen cannons capable of stopping any Union gunboat that tried to push upriver. Its mission was threefold: protect the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad bridge at Weldon, shield the upper Roanoke Valley from Federal raids, and guard the secret upriver construction of the ironclad CSS Albemarle.

Named for General Lawrence O'Bryan Branch, killed at Antietam just weeks before the fort was designed, it held until April tenth, eighteen sixty-five, the day after Lee's surrender at Appomattox. The Confederates then spiked their guns and pushed the cannon into the river. Several of the original cannons still sit on site today.