At midday on Thursday, November 17, 1864, Union Major General William T. Sherman rode into Conyers Station with Brigadier General William P. Carlin's 1st Division of Brigadier General Jefferson C. Davis's 14th Corps. During the next 24 hours, 13,500 men, 800 wagons, and 4,800 mules passed through the depot town, then known as Conyers Station and home to 400 people, on the March to the Sea. Members of Sherman's staff spent 1-1/2 hours in the home of Mrs. Amanda Scott at the southeast corner of Green and Scott Streets, where Majors Henry Hitchcock, Joseph C. Audenreid, and others may have been given a noonday meal by Mrs. Scott; whether Sherman ate near the house or inside, his meal seems to have been foraged locally. Newspapers from Augusta dated up to November 13th were found there, and from them Sherman learned that Confederates were unaware of his plans for the march. As his staff left Mrs. Scott's home, a group of local African-American men offered to volunteer, and Colonel Amos Beckwith, Sherman's chief-commissary officer, hired three as teamsters; others may have followed informally, as many enslaved people joined the column along the route in the hope of freedom. As Sherman and the 1st Division marched east toward Covington, the 2nd and 3rd Divisions moved into Conyers under Brigadier Generals James D. Morgan and Baird. Ordered to destroy the Georgia Railroad, soldiers pried up rails and ties, burned the ties in great piles, and twisted red-hot rails around tree trunks, destruction to which Sherman said he gave his own personal attention. These fires and the countless campfires of Federal soldiers contrasted sharply with the darkened homes of Conyers, where residents feared to show light. Other fires were few because the depot building had already been burned on July 22 during a Federal cavalry raid commanded by Brigadier General Kenner Garrard, and the remains of a Confederate locomotive and train captured and burned in that raid still stood in the station yard when Sherman's troops arrived. On the morning of November 18, with the railroad destroyed, the 2nd and 3rd Divisions marched out of town, and the Georgia Railroad that had put Conyers on the map had brought the war directly through it.