Federal forces occupied LaGrange from 1862 to 1865 and made it an important supply base. General William T. Sherman established his headquarters there when the occupation began in 1862. In April 1863, Union Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson left LaGrange with a combined force of cavalry and artillery on an extended raid deep into Mississippi to disrupt Confederate supply lines before the Union advance on Vicksburg. General Andrew J. Smith started from LaGrange with another Union task force in July 1864 in a northern Mississippi campaign that included the Battle of Tupelo on July 14, and Colonel Edward Bouton's brigade of U.S. Colored Troops was in Smith's command. Many historic buildings associated with LaGrange's Civil War story still stand. Woodlawn, completed in 1828, was Sherman's headquarters and a Union army hospital. Hancock Hall, finished in 1857, served as General Stephen A. Hurlbut's headquarters, and General Ulysses S. Grant stayed there during a visit to LaGrange. Immanuel Episcopal Church, built by enslaved people in 1842, served as a Union hospital after the battles of Shiloh and Corinth. The Lucy Holcombe Pickens House was the birthplace and early residence of Lucy Holcombe, wife of Francis W. Pickens, the antebellum ambassador to Russia and wartime governor of South Carolina, and her portrait appeared on Confederate currency. In 1863, Captain Henry Forbes of Company B, 7th Illinois Volunteer Cavalry, wrote that LaGrange, once a neat little place of about a thousand people with improved yards, evergreens, rare shrubberies, a college building, and a ladies' seminary, had become a scene of desolation, with hospitals in former schools, churches, and private dwellings, burned fences, trampled gardens, and elegant evergreens turned into hitching posts for Yankee horses.