On March 24, 1865, Union Gen. George Stoneman led 6,000 cavalrymen from Tennessee into southwestern Virginia and western North Carolina to disrupt Confederate supply lines by destroying sections of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, the North Carolina Railroad, and the Piedmont Railroad. After striking Boone on March 28, moving into Virginia on April 2, and returning to North Carolina a week later, the raid ended at Asheville on April 26, the same day Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston surrendered to Union Gen. William T. Sherman near Durham. Col. William J. Palmer, commanding one of Stoneman’s brigades of about 1,300 cavalrymen from the 15th Pennsylvania, 12th Ohio, and 10th Michigan Regiments, made his headquarters at Sherrill’s Inn on April 27, 1865. The Sherrill family fed officers, and one daughter was said to have shaken her stocking over the eggs as they cooked and declared, “Those Yankees can eat the dust off my feet and think it’s pepper.” Palmer was brevetted to brigadier general, probably while there, and the promotion gave him command of two brigades already in Asheville that had participated in pillaging on April 26. A “Quaker warrior,” Palmer had joined the army as a way to express his abolitionist views, and he was later awarded the Medal of Honor for defeating a larger Confederate force at Red Hill, Alabama, on January 14, 1865, without losing a man. According to tradition, an underground railroad operated here through Hickory Nut Gap, helping Union sympathizers, slaves, and Federal soldiers escaping from prisons in Columbia, South Carolina, and Salisbury, North Carolina, travel to Union-controlled Tennessee. Capt. Harry Weand of the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry recalled the march through Hickory Nut Gap as the grandest scenery of their service, with the route along the Broad River to its source, towering crags of the Hickory Mountains, High Falls dropping 300 feet, magnolias in the forest, and forage at the top.