As part of a two-pronged cavalry raid, on Wednesday, July 27, 1864, Union Major General George Stoneman left the main Federal army near Atlanta with over 2,100 troopers under orders from Major General William T. Sherman to destroy the railroad leading north from Macon that resupplied Confederate-held Atlanta, and with permission to attempt freeing Federal prisoners at Andersonville. Riding through Covington and Monticello while foraging and destroying Confederate facilities, Stoneman was unable to find a bridge across the Ocmulgee River, so he abandoned his division's primary mission and rode farther south through Hillsboro and Clinton. After skirmishing with Confederate militia near Macon on July 30 and destroying rail facilities eastward including the Oconee River bridge, he received rumors of a sizeable Confederate cavalry force in pursuit and decided to return north by the same route. The following day, Sunday, July 31, his division encountered about 1,300 Confederate cavalrymen near Sunshine Church led by Clinton native Brigadier General Alfred Iverson, Jr., who had moved to block Stoneman's path. Dismissing alternative routes and believing his division to be the superior force, Stoneman ordered his exhausted cavalrymen to dismount and attack, but the Federals were repulsed and Iverson's Confederates counterattacked in fighting that one Federal trooper recalled left the road full of Yanks and rebs, everybody yelling "Surrender!" shooting, cutting and slashing. After a brief pause, a renewed Confederate attack struck Stoneman's weary command as Federal ammunition began running low, and fearing encirclement, more than half of the surviving Federal cavalrymen escaped across country. Stoneman masked their departure by ordering the expenditure of the last of his artillery's ammunition before surrendering himself and over 400 of his men, and ultimately only 800 members of his division made a safe return to Sherman's army. On Sunday, November 20, 1864, during the March to the Sea, the Federal 15th Corps under Major General Peter J. Osterhaus marched south from Hillsboro to Clinton as part of Major General Oliver O. Howard's Right Wing, and as they passed through the July 31 Sunshine Church battlefield, Captain Charles W. Wills of the 103rd Illinois Infantry Regiment recorded the discovery of two unburied dead soldiers. The original Sunshine Church, which stood south of the present church building, served as a country field school before the battle and as a temporary hospital during it, was later burned, and was replaced in 1875 by the current church. In 1890, Barzillah F. Morris, a former Federal sergeant from Ohio who had been wounded in the Battle of Sunshine Church and cared for by local families, returned to preach there.