In September 1864, after Union Gen. William T. Sherman defeated Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood at Atlanta, Hood led the Army of Tennessee northwest against Sherman's supply lines. Rather than contest Sherman's "March to the Sea," Hood then moved north into Tennessee, where Union Gen. John M. Schofield, detached from Sherman's army, delayed Hood at Columbia and Spring Hill before falling back to Franklin. The bloodbath there on November 30 crippled Hood's force, but the Confederates followed Schofield to the outskirts of Nashville and Union Gen. George H. Thomas's strong defenses. Hood's campaign ended when Thomas crushed his army on December 15-16. On December 2, 1864, two days after the Battle of Franklin, Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood made his headquarters here at Travellers Rest. He found three white women-Harriet Maxwell Overton and her sisters, Mary Maxwell and Annie Claiborne-and eighty enslaved workers running the plantation. Overton's husband, Confederate supporter John Overton Jr., had fled to Confederate lines when Union forces threatened to arrest him in 1862. Annie Claiborne's husband, Thomas Claiborne, was a U.S. Army officer who left his post in Texas to join the Confederacy. She came here with their two children and twenty enslaved people and used her U.S. Army connections to help the family. When she went to Union Gen. Gordon Granger's headquarters for supplies, he told his old acquaintance, "Mrs. Claiborne, I am surprised to see you among these rebels." She replied, "The place whereon we stand was a cane brake when my grandfather came to Tennessee; there are sixty thousand Tennesseans in the Southern Army, where would you expect me to stand?" On December 16, a failed Union attack at Peach Orchard Hill 600 yards ahead to your left resulted in heavy casualties, especially among several regiments of U.S. Colored Troops (USCT). The 13th USCT lost 221 men out of 470. Pvt. Freeman Thomas, 12th USCT, born into slavery and owned by James Caruthers of Williamson County, later wrote, "When we made the attack .. we was not far from John Overton's place. I received the wound in my left leg in John Overton's wood lot." The Battle of Nashville ended in Hood's defeat later that day.
