The Carolinas Campaign began on February 1, 1865, when Union Gen. William T. Sherman led his army north from Savannah, Georgia, after the March to the Sea, aiming to join Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia against Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. In North Carolina, scattered Confederate forces consolidated in the Confederacy's logistical lifeline, where Sherman defeated Gen. Joseph E. Johnston's last-ditch attack at Bentonville; after reinforcements reached Sherman at Goldsboro late in March, Johnston surrendered at Bennett Place near Durham on April 26, ending the Civil War. On Gum Swamp Creek, the Murdoch Morrison Gun Factory used water power to manufacture rifles modeled after the Buchanan Rifle, along with other weapons for the Confederate army, until Sherman's army swept through here on March 9, 1865. Three millponds on the creek also powered textile mills built before the Civil War. When Sherman's army entered North Carolina eight miles south of here, poor weather and wet bottomlands soon bogged it down, and marching was especially difficult toward the Lumber River north of here. Part of the army bivouacked for the night on March 9 three miles away at Laurel Hill Church. Gen. Evander McNair, born in Laurel Hill, later moved to Mississippi and Arkansas and led a Confederate brigade in major battles in the Mississippi River valley, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Old Wire Road was one of the earliest roads through the Carolinas, the main route from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans, La., with one of the first telegraph lines between those cities strung along it, and Laurel Hill developed as a regular stop for travelers between Fayetteville, N.C., and Columbia, S.C.