By late 1862, war had reached the Jordan farm when Confederate engineer Charles Dimmock laid out ten miles of defenses to protect Petersburg, with Battery 5 of the Dimmock Line standing only yards from the Josiah Jordan House. During the Siege of Petersburg, Union troops dismantled the house, leaving only a gentle depression as its vestige. When Union and Confederate armies swarmed over this area in 1864, dozens of farmers like Jordan were uprooted, their homes damaged or destroyed, their woodlots cut, and their fields ravaged, and the landscape still bears the scars.