Ivanhoe Plantation, part of the Whitehead family property, stood near the northeast corner of Quaker Road and Walker Bridge Road, also called Story Mill Road. On Sunday, November 27, 1864, Federal cavalry under Brigadier General H. Judson Kilpatrick reached Ivanhoe during operations ordered by Union Major General William T. Sherman to feint toward Augusta and draw Confederate attention while Sherman's infantry moved toward Savannah with little opposition. Before arriving by way of Ogeechee Shoals, Gibson, and Sylvan Grove, Kilpatrick's rear guard had been attacked repeatedly by the outnumbered Confederate cavalry of Major General Joseph Wheeler. At Ivanhoe, the plantation house was spared, but Catharine Barnes Whitehead Rowland recorded that troops broke open the storeroom, stole supplies and possessions, scattered syrup, flour, and sugar, killed turkeys and chickens, and left the property strewn with trash; she also wrote that a soldier from Michigan named Whitehead took a water dipper bearing her father's name and that Kilpatrick asked for silver. Federal troops began making camp near the house to stay overnight, but gunfire soon erupted as Wheeler's Confederates attacked again, and a brief fight raged around and east of the house, with bullets falling in the yard and one passing through the kitchen. Kilpatrick's cavalry then rode east on Quaker Road toward Waynesborough, seeking to burn the bridges over Brier Creek north of town, while Wheeler's men camped a short distance northwest of the house to protect those bridges and continued harassing the Federals through Waynesborough and south to Big Buckhead Church. Wheeler kept his headquarters near Ivanhoe for several days until Kilpatrick returned to the area reinforced by Federal infantry, and Catharine Rowland regarded Wheeler as the instrument of her family's deliverance, insisting that a child born to an enslaved family servant on the day of the fight be named Wheeler in his honor.