After the Civil War, Confederate veterans returned to a community they found in chaos and occupied by what they deemed an army of occupation, and they organized a local home guard. From this group emerged an inner circle of outlaws that became the West and Kimbrel Clan, also known as the Nightriders. Operating along the Harrisonburg Road, a wagon road established in the mid-late 19th century that connected the Natchez Trace and El Camino Real, the group robbed and murdered travelers in the years following the Civil War while claiming to be upstanding citizens and concealing their identities as murderers and robbers. Led by John West and Jackson Lawson "Laws" Kimbrel, the clan was linked to the Kimbrel family's store and post office at Wheeling and to a nearby neighborhood school known as the Barefoot School. The Kimbrel family home, about one mile west on the Harrisonburg Road, served as a wayside inn for east-west travelers, and many who stayed there later fell victim to the West-Kimbrel Clan, with many murdered and their bodies thrown into wells along the road. On Easter Sunday, 1870, citizens rounded up and killed many of the Nightriders, including John West, and buried them in Atlanta, Louisiana, eight miles east of the site. Laws Kimbrel and his brother Owen Struderic "Shep" Kimbrel escaped; Shep was later killed by lawmen in Oklahoma, and Laws was captured and hanged in Austin, Texas, in 1873.