During the war, Cumberland Gap became the principal passage between the eastern and western theaters of operation in the Upper South, and whichever side held the high ground there held the Gap. In 1861, Confederate Gen. Felix K. Zollicoffer's men occupied Cumberland Gap and began erecting fortifications, some of which still exist today, despite backbreaking work and unforgiving terrain. President Abraham Lincoln worried about the Unionists in East Tennessee, writing that they were being hanged and driven to despair and that he feared they might take up rebel arms for personal protection. In April 1863, at a conference with Gen. Oliver O. Howard, Lincoln pointed to the Gap on a wall map and asked whether Howard could go through there and seize Knoxville. Union control of East Tennessee was eventually achieved by other generals. After the war, Howard remembered Lincoln's concern for the region, and after founding Howard University in Washington and serving as its president from 1869 to 1873, he came to Cumberland Gap in 1895, acquired the failed Four Seasons Hotel, and helped establish Lincoln Memorial University on that site in memory of his former commander-in-chief. The stone wall at the museum entrance is virtually all that remains of the hotel.