On July 18, 1863, Union Gen. Edward E. Potter led infantry and cavalry from New Bern to destroy the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad bridge at Rocky Mount. The infantry feinted toward Kinston and retreated to New Bern, while Potter raided Greenville, sent part of his cavalry to Rocky Mount, and occupied Tarboro. After bivouacking in the village of Sparta south of here, Potter entered Tarboro on July 20 with a battalion of New York cavalrymen. A wealthy Tar River town and trading center surrounded by productive plantations, Tarboro played a pivotal role in providing foodstuffs, medicine, and military supplies to Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Potter reported finding an iron-clad on the stocks and two steamboats on the river, and all were burned along with some railroad cars, 100 bales of cotton, quartermaster's subsistence, and ordnance stores. The raiders also damaged or destroyed bridges, trains, munitions, and mills, and soldiers plundered private homes, the Masonic Lodge, the Bank of Tarboro, and other businesses for valuables. After the engagement at Daniel's Schoolhouse a few miles east of here, the Federals marched south in the evening back through Sparta toward New Bern, setting the Tar River bridge afire behind them, but townspeople extinguished it before it sustained extensive damage. The raiders returned to New Bern on July 23, though the Confederates restored rail service by Aug. 1. Tarboro's town common had been laid out when the town was incorporated in 1760. During the Civil War, two Confederate hospitals stood there in the old Male and Female Academies, and a Confederate prison stockade for Union soldiers captured at the Battle of Plymouth was there in April 1864. The Wyatt Fountain was erected after the war in honor of Pvt. Henry Lawson Wyatt, a Tarboro resident killed at the Battle of Big Bethel on June 10, 1861, the first North Carolinian known to have died in battle during the war.