Overton / Hillsman House

As night fell on April 6, 1865, after the hard-fought battles of Little Sailor's Creek and the crossroads near the Marshall Farm drew to a close, Federal surgeons worked by the fading natural light inside the Overton and Hillsman house, using its main doorways to try to save wounded men from both armies. Hospital stewards prepared men for surgery, assisted with amputations, bandaged wounds, and tried to comfort the injured. Built by Moses Overton in the early 1770's and occupied by the James Moses Hillsman family, the house stood on a farm where battle raged while Hillsman, a former captain in the 44th Virginia Infantry captured at Spotsylvania in May, 1864, remained a prisoner of war. During the fighting, his wife Lucy Blanton Hillsman, his mother Martha Overton Hillsman, two children, and eight servants were forced to stay in the basement warming kitchen as the home became the Sixth Corps field hospital. The family endured the grim realities of war as blood soaked the entry hall floor and the cries of the wounded and dying sounded above them. After surgeries were completed, amputated limbs were thrown outside, and wounded men were either carried outdoors to recover or placed in one of the house's four rooms. Before leaving, Federal troops temporarily buried their own dead on the farm before those bodies were later removed to Poplar Grove National Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia. Confederate dead were left unburied until former Hillsman slaves buried them in mass, unmarked graves on the battlefield. Afterward, Lucy Hillsman left the house with her family and never returned.

Virginia · United States