On June 2, 1864, the Cold Harbor battlefield at this spot was a scene of intense fighting as Union cannons fired at Confederate lines only a half-mile ahead. The Garthright House and its outbuildings stood in the background, with the tree-lined Cold Harbor road off to the right. Here the Second and Sixth Corps joined, with one of Gibbon’s brigades of M’kean’s Second Division, Second Corps massed under a crest on the left, including the Nineteenth and Twentieth Massachusetts, and the old Jersey brigade of the Sixth Corps to the right of the house. These troops held lines taken from the enemy, no more than a hundred yards from the Confederate front. A section of Stevens’s 5th Maine battery stood on the extreme left, Mott’s 3rd New York Independent battery occupied the foreground, and these and other batteries soon silenced the enemy’s artillery while musket balls swept the rifle pits, where the dead and wounded lay thickly.