On April 23, 1864, a Union force with 240 wagons left Camden to get supplies from Pine Bluff for Gen. Frederick Steele's army. On April 25, Gen. James Fagan's Confederate cavalrymen ambushed them at Marks' Mills, and the first shots of the battle were fired near here. After 5 hours of heavy combat, the Union troops surrendered with some 1,500 casualties, mostly prisoners, while Fagan lost only 293 men in his one-sided victory. The disastrous defeat at Marks' Mills, following an earlier loss at Poison Spring, led Steele to abandon Camden and retreat to Little Rock. Young Eleanor and Martha Marks witnessed the opening of the battle from their front porch and saw several men killed on the road and in their yard. Four Confederates were buried in their garden and dozens of Union dead were buried in their orchard. The Marks family home served as a hospital in the combat's aftermath, and their cousin Mollie Marks helped three wounded Union soldiers from the battlefield to the hospital and helped nurse them back to health, actions that led to her nomination to be local postmaster many years later.