Confederate Headquarters

The Howard House at this location served as Confederate headquarters during the Battle of Wyse Fork, March 8-10, 1865, when General Braxton Bragg commanded a Confederate army made up of the forces of Major General D.H. Hill and Major General Robert F. Hoke. On the night of March 7, 1865, Bragg, Hill, and Hoke planned there at the front of the little white house the final strategy to stop the Union advance of Major General Jacob D. Cox’s corps, the lead corps of General John M. Schofield’s army moving from New Bern toward Goldsboro to unite with General William T. Sherman’s army. The battle that followed produced what was probably the last major Confederate tactical victory of the war, as Hoke’s forces surprised and captured, killed, or wounded most of Union Brigade Commander Colonel Charles L. Upham’s force, including soldiers from the 15th Connecticut and 27th Massachusetts infantry regiments and a section of Battery D, 3rd New York Artillery, in the war’s last mass capture of Union troops by Confederates. The house stood on the Dover Road near its junction with the Neuse Road, behind Southwest Creek, the main Confederate defensive line, and under the protection of artillery near Jackson’s Mill; the eastern line of defense for mid-Eastern North Carolina extended along the west bank of Southwest Creek from the Neuse River to Jackson’s millpond on the Dover Road to protect the approaches to Kinston and the interior of North Carolina from attacks launched from the Union base at New Bern.

North Carolina · United States