The south abutment of the bridge that once carried the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad across Potomac Creek survives as earth mounds and protruding stone blocks. During the first year of the Civil War, this railroad served as the principal lifeline for Confederate encampments and batteries along the nearby Potomac River shore. In the spring of 1862, General Joseph E. Johnston ordered Confederate forces to abandon the area, and advancing Union troops found only the bridge's ruins at Potomac Creek. Over the next three years, the Union army built as many as four railroad bridges on the same abutment. In May 1862, engineer Herman Haupt directed unskilled Union infantrymen in harvesting two million feet of local lumber and completed the first of these bridges in just nine days. During a visit to the Fredericksburg area, President Abraham Lincoln walked across the eighty-foot-high, four-hundred-foot-long span with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren; Stanton became dizzy and finished the crossing by holding Dahlgren's hand. Around 1899, the south abutment and its approaching right-of-way were abandoned, and the railroad and bridge were shifted to their present locations.