Sherman's Headquarters at Bentonville

Four hundred yards behind this marker, General William Tecumseh Sherman made his headquarters during the climactic Battle of Bentonville from March nineteenth through twenty-first, eighteen sixty-five. Sherman's army of more than sixty thousand men had swept through Georgia and up through South Carolina, leaving a wide corridor of destruction. Now in North Carolina, they faced the last coordinated Confederate resistance in the eastern theater.

General Joseph Johnston had scraped together every available Southern force to try to stop them. The fighting at Bentonville was fierce, but the numbers were impossibly lopsided. After three days Sherman's forces held the field.

Johnston retreated, and within weeks he surrendered to Sherman at the Bennett Place farmhouse near Durham, the largest troop surrender of the entire war. Sherman stood here knowing that the conflict was nearly finished, that four years of catastrophic violence were about to end.