The Maryland Brigade at Laurel Hill

On May eighth eighteen sixty-four, during Ulysses Grant's Overland Campaign, Union soldiers of the Maryland Brigade charged Confederate earthworks here on Laurel Hill, part of the brutal fighting around Spotsylvania Court House. The attack was repulsed with heavy casualties. Colonel Charles Phelps of the Seventh Maryland Infantry led the charge and later received the Medal of Honor for his actions during the campaign.

Laurel Hill was part of the larger Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, one of the costliest engagements of the Civil War, where Grant and Lee fought to a grinding stalemate across two weeks in May eighteen sixty-four. The Confederate defensive lines here were so well positioned that repeated Union assaults failed at enormous cost. The campaign nonetheless kept pressure on Lee after the Wilderness battle days earlier.