The 1836 Gates County Courthouse served as headquarters for the Gates County militia, and when the war began the Gates Guards were organized and mustered into Confederate service there as Co. B, 1st North Carolina Infantry. Other Gates County units included the Gates Minutemen, Co. H, 5th North Carolina Infantry, and the Orapeake Guards, Co. C, 52nd North Carolina Infantry, while the 1st North Carolina Cavalry was formed from other county militia. William P. Roberts of Gates County enlisted in the 1st North Carolina Cavalry and rose to become the youngest Confederate general, at age twenty-three, by the war’s end. Before leaving to fight, members of the Gates Guards signed their names on the wall in a second-floor room in the courthouse, now called the Patriots Room, and their signatures remain visible there. Anticipating the arrival of Union troops, county records dating to 1779 were removed to Allen Smith’s house and safely concealed there for the duration of the war. Fifty years after the war ended, on July 18, 1915, thirty Confederate veterans assembled across the street from the courthouse to unveil the Confederate Monument, where John J. Gatling, who had served in the Gates Guards and Co. B, 5th North Carolina Infantry, recalled imagining his dead comrades rising from forgotten battlefields in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania and urging him to go forward and do his duty.