At Ocmulgee, the lower and middle Creek trading paths met, making the area an ideal place for a trading post. Almost 100 years before the American Revolution, the Creeks traded with the British there. In 1690, an English trader from Charleston built a trading store beside the traditional Creek path that ran from Augusta, Georgia, to the lower Creek Towns along the Chattahoochee River. A stockade wall and shallow ditch protected the store from attack. The Creeks exchanged fur and skins for European goods such as guns, iron pots, knives, and cotton cloth. After the Yamassee War erupted in 1715 in protest against British corruption in the fur trade, the Creeks moved back to the Chattahoochee River and abandoned the village. Archaeological excavations in the area have found hundreds of axes, beads, clay pipes, knives, swords, bullets, flints, pistols, muskets, and burial pits, and have located the sites of the trading post store, the stockade walls, and the Creek trading path. A Civil War trench was also identified that bisected both the trading post and the path, probably built in 1864 by conscripted slave labor when Georgia Governor Brown called on the citizens of Macon to defend the city from the approaching forces of Union General W.T. Sherman.