During Stoneman's Raid, launched on March 24, 1865, to disrupt Confederate supply lines by destroying sections of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, the North Carolina Railroad, and the Piedmont Railroad, Union cavalry moved from Tennessee through southwestern Virginia and western North Carolina before ending at Asheville on April 26, the day Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston surrendered near Durham. On April 20, 1865, Union Gen. Alvan C. Gillem, leading two of George Stoneman's brigades toward Asheville, tried to cross the Blue Ridge at Swannanoa Gap, but Confederate Gen. James G. Martin sent his entire command there and stopped him at Royal Gorge. Home Guard members felled trees across the roads to Swannanoa and Lakey's Gaps to form barricades, though some were trapped in the gorge and captured. After finding Swannanoa Gap effectually blockaded and defended, Gillem left Col. John K. Miller's brigade to pin the Confederates with feigned attacks while he led the rest of his men south to Rutherfordton, then reached the approaches to Asheville two days later after a forced march through Rutherford, Polk, and Henderson Counties. Nearby, a mysterious grave became the subject of conflicting Confederate veterans' stories, either as the burial place of a Union scout called Bill after a scuffle with a Home Guardsman, or of a Union deserter named Carter who killed a guard named Bledsoe before being shot himself; a later account said Carter was exhumed in 1914 and reburied in a Henderson County churchyard.