In June 1864, to deny Gen. Robert E. Lee the use of the South Side R.R. and the Richmond and Danville R.R., Gen. Ulysses S. Grant sent Gen. James H. Wilson and Gen. August V. Kautz south of Petersburg on a cavalry raid to destroy track and rolling stock. The main Union force arrived at Drakes Branch about 9 A.M. on June 25 and halted for two hours. Federal troops continued destroying track from there to present-day Randolph, then known as Roanoke Station, and burned depot buildings, works, sawmills, tobacco houses, and corn cribs while sparing grist mills. Col. John B. McIntosh reported that regiments were kept constantly engaged in tearing up and burning the railroad as far down as Drakes Branch, that the excessive heat exhausted the men, and that the division halted there for three or four hours so the working parties could rejoin it, without enemy interference. Col. Samuel D. Spears likewise recorded reaching Drakes Branch Station at 9 A.M. on June 25, destroying the railroad as on previous days, halting for two hours, and then marching toward Roanoke Station. After the evacuation of Richmond on April 2, 1865, Confederate president Jefferson Davis, members of his Cabinet, and a guard from the Confederate navy protecting the Confederate treasury passed through Drakes Branch on their way to Danville. As a water and fuel stop on the Richmond and Danville R.R., Drakes Branch may have been where the train refueled before Davis assembled the remnants of his government at the Sutherlin Mansion in Danville, making that city the last capital of the Confederacy. Persistent rumors later held that Confederate gold was buried along Davis’s escape route to keep it from Federal capture, and those stories became local folklore.