In September 1864, after Union Gen. William T. Sherman defeated Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood at Atlanta, Hood led the Army of Tennessee northwest against Sherman’s supply lines and then moved north into Tennessee rather than contest Sherman’s March to the Sea. Gen. John M. Schofield, detached from Sherman’s army, delayed Hood at Columbia and Spring Hill before falling back to Franklin, where the bloodbath on November 30 crippled the Confederates; they nevertheless followed Schofield to the outskirts of Nashville and Union Gen. George H. Thomas’s strong defenses, and Hood’s campaign ended when Thomas crushed his army on December 15-16. On November 29, 1864, one day before the Battle of Franklin, fighting at Thompson’s Station alarmed Schofield’s army as it marched north toward Nashville from Spring Hill. Lt. Col. Daniel W. McCoy and the 175th Ohio Infantry had for a time occupied ground near the railroad depot, but Confederate Gen. Lawrence S. Ross’s cavalry brigade from Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s command drove off the Ohio regiment, burned the bridge and depot, and attacked a train arriving from the south. The engineer backed hastily toward Spring Hill and spread word that raised concerns the Federal escape route to Nashville had been blocked. By that afternoon Ross’s men also held the Columbia Pike, but about sundown they withdrew toward Spring Hill for further orders. After midnight they returned to the station and attacked the head of the Federal wagon train, but Union infantry arrived near dawn, drove Ross off, and the rest of Schofield’s army slipped past Hood’s army, marched through Thompson’s Station, and escaped to Franklin. Another action was fought here on March 5, 1863, when Union Col. John Coburn’s infantry and cavalry engaged Confederate Gen. Earl Van Dorn’s cavalry. Some of the fighting swirled around the nearby Thompson House, now called Homestead Manor. Forrest’s cavalrymen galloped in from the east, got behind some of the Union infantrymen on the other side of the road, and cut off their retreat. Coburn’s attack suddenly collapsed, and more than 1,000 Union soldiers surrendered. Two months later, local physician George Peters murdered Van Dorn at Spring Hill after discovering the general was having an affair with Peters’s young wife.