At first light on August 20, 1864, Confederate General Sul Ross’s Texas Cavalry found Kilpatrick’s retreating Federal force near Lee’s Mill and fought its rear guard as it moved south toward the McDonough Road on the way to Lovejoy’s Station. By midmorning, Ross reached Kilpatrick’s main body near the station, where the Texans were joined by the cavalry brigades of Generals Red Jackson and Daniel Reynolds’s Arkansas infantry brigade. Kilpatrick’s troopers were soon surrounded at Lovejoy’s Station and fell back eastward on the McDonough Road, reforming on a ridge just west of the Nash farm, where a plan of escape was quickly arranged. Near the Nash place, Ross dismounted his troopers in a lane and deployed them in line in an open field south of the lane while a section of Croft’s Georgia Battery was placed on an elevation to the right. Seeing the danger, Kilpatrick tried to save his command by a desperate cavalry charge to break through the encircling Confederates. His raiders advanced in three heavy columns along the McDonough Road under cover of Lieutenant Young’s howitzer, but Young fired shells across the charging columns until his ammunition was exhausted and his gun was overrun. The bronze twelve-pounder under Lieutenant George B. Young of Columbus, Georgia, was turned rapidly in several directions, breaking the charging columns so they passed without overrunning it. Although the enemy repeatedly tried to take the gun and Ross twice urged Young to leave it and save his men, Young refused while a shot remained, and Ross then brought thirty men to stand with him until every round had been fired. On the next-to-last round, a double charge of grapeshot cracked the barrel, but the last shot was still fired before the disabled bronze howitzer was abandoned. Kilpatrick’s troopers then hauled the gun away as a battlefield trophy and continued east toward McDonough. Young reported one artilleryman killed, Corporal A.F. Knight, and five wounded.