After Union Gen. Ebenezer Dumont’s troops surprised Confederate Gen. John Hunt Morgan’s command at Lebanon on May 5, 1862, Morgan’s men escaped north toward the Cumberland River and, though hotly pursued, reached Rome first and found the ferry anchored on their side, allowing them to cross in haste while leaving many horses behind, including Morgan’s favorite mount, Black Bess. Dumont, pleased with his victory at Lebanon but disappointed that Morgan escaped, reported that he had pursued the enemy until his horses began to drop dead under their riders and until the Confederates had been so killed, wounded, captured, or scattered by byroads that not more than forty men remained together, and that the pursuit was finally abandoned at Carthage; from Lebanon to Carthage, he said, the road was strewn with the enemy’s dead and wounded and with horses shot or dead from exhaustion, while his own command suffered even more in that respect. Another event here underscored the viciousness of the war in this region when, in the summer of 1864, Confederate Gen. Joseph Wheeler allowed some local men of his 4th Tennessee Cavalry to visit their families, and Capt. John Marcellus Grissum came to his family home near here, where Union soldiers found and executed him, his brother Thomas, and his nephew Wilson G. Hankins, who were Confederate recruits, in front of the family smokehouse on September 3, 1864; they were buried in a nearby field on Whitefield Road, at the site of the present-day Grissum Cemetery.