During the Civil War, Henderson, first called Dayton and later renamed Henderson Station, stood on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad as a village of houses and stores facing the tracks. After the fall of Fort Donelson in February 1862, Governor Isham G. Harris ordered Confederate militia from Henry, Weakley, Gibson, Carroll, Benton, Decatur, Hardin, McNairy, Hardeman, and Madison counties to rendezvous at Henderson Station, and Confederate Colonel Benjamin J. Lea of the 52nd Tennessee Infantry established his headquarters there and sent out scouting parties during February and March 1862. General Braxton Bragg also ordered new companies to muster there. After the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, Union troops controlled the town, but in November Confederate Assistant Quartermaster A.B. Crook, with 400 troopers of the 18th Tennessee Cavalry, surprised the Union garrison, burned the depot and 74 bales of cotton, and set fire to a railroad bridge, which certain women of the town saved with buckets. General Ulysses S. Grant then ordered that those women be protected in their property and the quiet of their homes and that they receive free rations from time to time. Henderson remained under Union occupation for the rest of the war.