In the spring of 1864, Union armies opened offensives across unconquered parts of the South, and in Virginia the largest Northern army under Gen. Ulysses S. Grant fought Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Confederates in the Overland Campaign. Costly stalemates at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania delayed Grant’s progress, Confederates then blocked his southward drive at the North Anna River, and at the end of May 1864 they again stopped his direct path to Richmond along Totopotomoy Creek. There, aggressive probes up and down the creek valley touched off many small battles and showed Grant that the Confederates still stood in his way. The armies then collided at Cold Harbor, where Grant’s assaults on June 1 and June 3 failed, after which the Union army moved south to Petersburg to begin cutting Richmond’s supply lines. Rural Plains, home of the Shelton family for 275 years and sustained before the war by the labor of 37 slaves on a nearly 1,000-acre plantation, was swept into the fighting on May 29, 1864, when Union officers used the house as a headquarters, soldiers dug earthworks across the fields, the family sheltered in the basement, and fighting around the house turned the homeplace into a battlefield.
