These fortifications formed part of the outer defensive line begun during the Peninsula Campaign to protect Richmond. On June 12, 1862, at 5 A.M., Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart and 1,200 cavalrymen, including several familiar with local roads, left camps on the Mordecai and Young farms and passed through the line here after Gen. Robert E. Lee ordered Stuart to probe the Federal army for weaknesses and locate the Union flanks. Riding north on the Brook Turnpike, the column passed through the outer defenses at this point to begin the ride that encircled Union Gen. George B. McClellan's army and gave Lee information he used to launch the Seven Days' Battles on June 26. On June 3, 1862, Lee ordered Confederate engineer Maj. Walter H. Stevens to identify positions for Richmond's fortifications, and the next day he directed division commanders to designate 300-man working parties. Confederate soldiers quickly built simple trenches and rifle pits here above swampy Brook Run, and an artillery battery soon added gun emplacements like this one. By July 1863, other Confederate soldiers had built stronger earthworks linking the batteries. The works were largely unoccupied in March 1864, when Gen. H. Judson Kilpatrick's cavalrymen captured a few pickets in rifle pits nearby. During the Civil War, Confederate authorities also drafted enslaved men to construct, maintain, link, and strengthen fortifications. Available records indicate that Confederate soldiers built the first works here and the artillery positions, but unrecorded enslaved laborers probably strengthened and joined the works that became the miles-long Outer Line. Later, many thousands of enslaved workers and their families escaped to Union lines, virtually emptying the Confederate labor pool.
