For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, the lower Savannah River area was largely occupied by rice-growing plantations. Among the most notable was Mulberry Grove, once the home of General Nathanael Greene. After Greene’s death in 1786, his widow Catherine continued planting there. In 1793, Eli Whitney, a young Yale College graduate hired by Mrs. Greene to tutor her children, invented at Mulberry Grove a cotton gin, which successfully separated the seed of upland cotton from the boll without ruining the fiber. The machine transformed cotton production in the South and gave new economic life to slavery. After costly patent defenses turned Whitney away from cotton gins and toward gun-making, he pioneered the use of interchangeable parts, revolutionizing that industry and others. More than 70 years later, on Saturday, December 10, 1864, Federal soldiers in the Left Wing of Major General William T. Sherman’s army reached this area during the March to the Sea and formed part of the contiguous siege line against Confederate-held Savannah. That day, Captain Henry A. Gildersleeve of the 150th New York Infantry Regiment, foraging near the river with his 43-man company, engaged the Confederate steamer Ida as it attempted to pass upstream from Savannah to Augusta carrying Colonel J.H.M. Clinch and dispatches from Lieutenant General William J. Hardee to General Pierre G.T. Beauregard. When the vessel came within musket range, the Union fire forced it to turn back, run aground, and surrender; its crew and Clinch were taken prisoner and the Ida was burned. On December 12, Captain Charles E. Winegar’s Battery I of the 1st New York Light Artillery Regiment, positioned at Colerain Plantation, fought a 45-minute duel with the Confederate gunboats Macon and Sampson and their tender Resolute; Macon and Sampson retreated upriver to Augusta, while Resolute was disabled and captured. As Federal troops solidified their siege line near Savannah, foragers roamed the countryside, and several Savannah River plantations, including Mulberry Grove, were burned, ending its large-scale rice-growing operation.