On the late afternoon of September 14, 1862, a few hundred feet north of this site, the 50th Georgia Infantry Regiment of Brig. Gen. Thomas F. Drayton's Brigade was decimated by elements of Gen. Orlando B. Willcox's 3,600-man Federal division. Caught in an exposed position while deploying from behind a stone wall into the Old Sharpsburg Road, the Wiregrass Georgians were cut to pieces when Willcox's division launched a simultaneous assault against the Confederate lines. Dead and wounded piled up in the sunken road as volley after volley raked the huddled regiment. After about thirty minutes of horrific enemy fire, the Georgians' resistance broke, and the survivors retreated west out of the road through a gauntlet of enemy rifles. Of an estimated 225 officers and enlisted men engaged, 47 were killed and 112 wounded, 22 mortally, and many of the wounded were left on the field and captured.
