At 6:57 P.M. on June 28, 1863, Confederate General John B. Gordon's veterans advanced at Wrightsville with orders to seize the railroad bridge and cross to the Columbia side on their way toward Harrisburg, while Union Col. Jacob G. Frick's 27th Pennsylvania Volunteer Militia, recently armed during the Emergency of 1863, defended the town from earthworks with support from another emergency regiment and a company of African Americans from nearby Columbia. The 31st Georgia Infantry sent skirmishers into the fields, Gordon's artillery moved up, and two guns unlimbered in the Huber farmhouse yard. About half an hour after the opening shot, Frick, seeing a Confederate regiment nearing the river on his right as shells and bullets shook his men, ordered a retreat that collapsed into panic, and the Georgians drove the Federals through Wrightsville's streets. Frick's men fled across the mile-long railroad bridge, which had been mined, and when the charges failed to destroy it, he ordered it burned. As the fire spread from the bridge into town, Gordon's men and local townspeople formed a bucket brigade and fought the flames through midnight. Frick had previously fought at Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862, and at Chancellorsville on May 3, 1863, saving his regimental colors in both battles, and in 1892 he received the Medal of Honor for that bravery.