Union Hospital at Bentonville

This ground served as a field hospital during the last major Confederate offensive of the Civil War. The Battle of Bentonville in March of eighteen sixty-five was General Joseph Johnston's desperate attempt to stop Sherman's march through the Carolinas. Three days before the main engagement, Union troops fought at Averasboro, sixteen miles to the west.

Four hundred wounded men from that fight were carried here by wagon and laid out for surgeons working in whatever shelter they could find. Field hospitals of the Civil War era were brutal necessities. Chloroform was used for major amputations when available, but supplies were often short and conditions primitive.

The men treated here were part of Sherman's massive army driving toward the final surrender, which came just weeks later when Johnston capitulated to Sherman at the Bennett Place farmhouse, not far from Durham.