The Battle of Shultz Mill on Cosby Creek took place on the afternoon of January 14, 1864, in a field across from Shultz’ Mill on the western bank of Cosby Creek, 900 yards south toward Gatlinburg. Before the battle, Confederate General R.B. Vance, brother of North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance, had been ordered to advance on the Tennessee borders and mountain passes during a January 1864 trek in which his men hauled wagons over the mountain and dismounted cannon, dragging them over the rocky trail and carrying wheels and axles to the bottom for reassembly before moving on to Sevierville, Tennessee. On January 13, 1864, while camped opposite Dandridge, Union Colonel William J. Palmer learned that Brigadier General R.B. Vance, with three hundred cavalry and dismounted Indians and two pieces of artillery, had advanced from North Carolina into Sevierville, twelve miles in Palmer’s rear, where they captured twenty wagons loaded with wheat for the army at Knoxville and twenty prisoners. Although rebel cavalry in his front threatened attack, Palmer set out with one hundred and twenty-five men, left his pickets in place to deceive the enemy, learned that Vance’s force had divided, and after a thirty-mile march overtook Vance’s party about eight miles from Newport. In a sabre charge, Palmer captured Vance, two staff officers, a lieutenant, fifty men, one hundred and fifty horses, the general’s ambulance filled with captured medical stores, and recovered the entire wagon train and prisoners, bringing them safely back to Sevierville. Robert Brank Vance, born in Buncombe County, North Carolina, on April 24, 1828, had twice been elected colonel of the Twenty-ninth North Carolina Regiment during the War Between the States and was appointed brigadier general in 1863. Captured at Shultz’s Mill, he spent the rest of the war in Union prisons in Nashville, Louisville, Ohio, and finally Fort Delaware. After the war he was elected as a Democrat to five succeeding Congresses from March 4, 1873, to March 3, 1885, returned to North Carolina and settled in Alexander, served in the State house of representatives from 1894 to 1896, and died on November 28, 1899, later being buried in Riverside Cemetery, Asheville, North Carolina.