In 1864, Sylvan Grove Plantation stood just outside Jackson, where Asa Buttrill had built a fourteen-room plantation house in the eighteen thirties for his bride, Lucy Manley, near a wellspring that supplied water to the estate. On Wednesday, November 16th, as more than 11,000 Federal soldiers of the 17th Corps in the Right Wing of Major General William T. Sherman's army approached, Asa Buttrill loaded two wagons with food and valuables and fled south for Macon while Lucy Buttrill remained at home. Early the next morning, Mary Buttrill, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of Asa and Lucy, Emma Manley, two enslaved maids named Martha and Mandy, and their driver Ben Drake, a crippled Confederate soldier, also left for Macon in a loaded phaeton-style carriage. Along the way they overtook Asa's wagons and encountered two Confederate scouts, one of them Taylor Buttrill, Mary's seventeen-year-old brother, before Federal cavalry suddenly appeared. The men fled with the phaeton and left the women behind, and after a brief exchange with Mary, Federal soldiers took the women to a two-room cabin and then to Colonel George E. Spencer of the Federal 1st Alabama Cavalry, whose regiment was scouting for the 17th Corps. Spencer gave them clothing and food and remained for three hours while the 17th Corps passed toward the Ocmulgee River at Seven Islands, and the women were later taken home in an ox cart. By the afternoon of November 17th, Union Major General Francis P. Blair, Jr. and his staff briefly occupied Sylvan Grove, and Federal stragglers looted the estate. Afterward, little remained to eat except scraps of potatoes and a little corn; only the furnishings in Lucy Buttrill's room and three chairs and a sofa in a parlor used by Blair remained in the house; Mary Buttrill's paintings, oils, watercolors, and India ink were ruined; and the barns, stables, cribs, fences, cotton, and gin house were burned while cows, chickens, horses, and mules were killed or stolen. Two weeks later, an uncle from an unaffected area west of Atlanta brought provisions. The plantation house survived the war but no longer exists.