After Union Gen. Ebenezer Dumont’s troops surprised Confederate Gen. John Hunt Morgan’s command at Lebanon on May 5, 1862, Morgan’s men escaped north and rushed toward the Cumberland River. Hotly pursued, the Confederates reached Rome first and found the ferry anchored on their side of the river, allowing their escape, though in their haste they left many horses behind, including Morgan’s favorite mount, Black Bess. Dumont was pleased with his victory at Lebanon but disappointed that Morgan and his troops escaped, and he reported that the pursuit continued to Carthage until his horses began dropping dead under their riders and the enemy had been killed, wounded, captured, or scattered so that not more than forty men were still together. He said the road from Lebanon to Carthage was strewn with the enemy’s dead and wounded and with horses shot or dead from exhaustion, and that his own command suffered even more in that respect. Another event here showed the viciousness of the war in this region: in the summer of 1864, when Confederate Gen. Joseph Wheeler’s 4th Tennessee Cavalry was nearby, he allowed some local men to visit their families, and Capt. John Marcellus Grissum came to his family home near here, but Union soldiers found and executed him, his brother Thomas, and his nephew Wilson G. Hankins, who were Confederate recruits, in front of the family smokehouse on September 3, 1864. They were buried in a nearby field on Whitefield Road at the site of the present-day Grissum Cemetery.