In late April 1865, Varina Davis and her four children, traveling south ahead of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, left Abbeville, South Carolina, with Burton Harrison and a small Confederate escort, crossed the Savannah River into Georgia on a military pontoon bridge at Hester's Ferry, and stayed overnight at the homes of John Chenault, built in 1853 and designed by John Cunningham, and of his brother Dionysus Chenault before continuing to Washington, Georgia. Near dawn on May 3rd, President Davis, members of his cabinet and staff, and their 2,500-man Confederate cavalry escort crossed the same bridge into Georgia; after breakfast and a rest stop, Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin departed in disguise as a Frenchman, with Colonel Henry J. Leovy as interpreter, carrying instructions to perform public duties in Nassau and Havana and then rejoin Davis in Texas, but he instead went to Florida and eventually to England, never returning to the United States. Davis, his family, and others were captured in Irwinville, Georgia, on Wednesday, May 10th. On May 24th, $450,000 in silver and gold coins belonging to six Richmond, Virginia, banks, which had been temporarily stored in Washington, began moving back toward Richmond under guard of a small detachment from the Federal 4th Iowa Calvary Regiment. Accounts differ on whether the wagon train stopped that evening at the Chenault homes or nearby at Susan Moss's home, but near midnight former Confederate soldiers and others stole $251,000, mostly in gold coins. Within days, former Confederate Brigadier General Edward Porter Alexander, a Washington resident, helped recover about $111,000 of the stolen money. In late July 1865, more than a dozen Federal soldiers of the 156th New York Infantry Regiment led by Brigadier General Edward A. Wild searched both Chenault homes for more of the missing money; although the Chenaults had played no part in the theft, female family members were strip searched and the men were hanged by their thumbs and tortured. Mary Ann Chenault Shumate, who was 17 at the time, later recalled that the pain was so great the men begged to be shot dead. Rumors of buried Confederate gold in the area have persisted, but none has ever been found.