In June 1864, to deny General Robert E. Lee the use of the South Side Railroad and the Richmond and Danville Railroad, General Ulysses S. Grant sent General James H. Wilson and General August V. Kautz south of Petersburg on a cavalry raid to destroy track and rolling stock. The 11th Pennsylvania Cavalry, the advance guard of the Wilson-Kautz column, arrived at Ream's Station about 7:30 a.m. on June 22 and burned the station and other buildings. The Petersburg and Weldon Railroad bed ran here. General James Dearing's 800-man cavalry brigade of General W.H.F. "Rooney" Lee's cavalry division was alerted, and it engaged the rear of Wilson's column in a running skirmish that continued some ten miles to Dinwiddie Court House. Ream's Station was guarded by a small body of militia, some of whom were captured and the rest dispersed. According to Edward P. Tobie of the 1st Maine Cavalry, the destruction then began, with all the buildings at the station, together with a locomotive and a train of five or six cars, consigned to the flames. A trooper of the 11th Pennsylvania Cavalry recalled that after enemy pickets were encountered near the Jerusalem Plank Road and pursued to Ream's Station, captured pickets informed General Kautz that General W.H.F. Lee, with two brigades of cavalry, was encamped in the path he had been ordered to take toward Southerland's on the South Side Railroad, so Kautz turned the head of his column down the Weldon road to avoid endangering the expedition at its outset.