During the Camden Expedition, Gen. Frederick Steele’s Union army left Camden on April 26, 1864, and retreated toward Little Rock. Confederate pursuers caught up with the column on April 29 on the Jenkins’ Ferry Road and skirmishing began. Union gunners of the 2nd Missouri Artillery held them back while Confederate Col. W.L. Jeffers deployed his troops, with Harris’s Confederate Battery sent to support him as soldiers of Burbridge’s Missouri regiment came up. Union troops of the 40th Iowa, 43rd Illinois, and 27th Wisconsin supported the Missouri battery as it held off the Confederates. During the artillery duel, Confederate shells damaged a nearby home known locally as the Cannonball House before the Union men withdrew to the Saline River bottoms in a driving rain, knowing Confederate troops were in pursuit and that battle was likely as they tried to cross the flooded Saline River at Jenkins’ Ferry the next day. After the battle of Jenkins’ Ferry, the Cannonball House was one of several local buildings used as hospitals, and casualties from the battle are believed to have been buried in the yard near the house.