In July 1863, as Union Gen. Edward E. Potter returned to New Bern after his raid, his troops set fire to the Hookerton Bridge while crossing Greene County. The bridges at Hookerton and nearby Haw Landing were essential crossing points over Contentnea Creek for Confederate troops in eastern North Carolina. After unsuccessful attempts to remove Union forces from New Bern and Washington, North Carolina, Confederate Gen. James J. Pettigrew established his brigade headquarters here in April 1863. His brigade included the 11th, 26th, 44th, 47th, and 52nd North Carolina Infantry Regiments. Henry King Burgwyn, commander of the 26th Regiment and, at 22, the youngest colonel in the Army of Northern Virginia, later died at Gettysburg. After Pettigrew’s brigade marched to Virginia to join Gen. Robert E. Lee’s incursion into Pennsylvania, a handful of men from a partisan ranger battalion joined the local home guard to protect the bridges here. Capt. Henry A. Hubbard of the 12th New York Cavalry, wounded and captured during Potter’s Raid, was released from a Confederate prisoner of war camp in September 1864 and rejoined his unit. On April 8, 1865, Confederate troops near here shot Hubbard and his orderly in an ambush; Hubbard escaped to his camp but died about eight hours later, one day before Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox Court House. The locally prominent Hooker family founded Hookerton here on family land; the place had been known as Caswell’s Landing before the Revolutionary War and was incorporated in 1817.