At 3 p.m. on Monday, March 6, 1865, the first of Union Gen. Philip H. Sheridan’s 10,000 cavalrymen under Gens. Wesley Merritt, Thomas Devin, and George A. Custer entered Scottsville unopposed to destroy the James River and Kanawha Canal as a Confederate supply and communication line. Officers occupied private homes, soldiers pitched tents in yards and fields, and the troops burned a woolen factory with cloth, a candle factory with candles and lard-oil, a large five-story flouring mill with flour, corn, and wheat, a large manufactory, machine shops, and tobacco warehouses; a few nearby private dwellings were charred by the heat, but no accident or loss of life occurred. They captured three canal boats, one loaded with 9,600 shells and two with Confederate government commissary stores and tobacco. Upriver they disabled canal locks from Scottsville to New Market, and downriver to Columbia they destroyed 8 locks, 13 canal bridges, 4 flouring mills, 1 warehouse, 60 hogsheads of tobacco, 1 boat house, and a lumber yard, and they also cut through canal banks in places, draining water into the river. The last Federals left on March 10 for Petersburg to take part in the end of the siege there and the pursuit of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army to Appomattox Court House. Cliffside, built by John Lewis II about 1785 and enlarged in 1810, served as the headquarters of Sheridan and Custer. Scottsville Baptist Church on Harrison Street had been impressed by Confederate authorities as a hospital in 1862, along with a hotel, a factory, a small frame house, and a newly erected building collectively called the Confederate General Hospital at Scottsville, which closed in September 1863 because of inadequate facilities, its isolated location, and unsatisfactory medical conditions. In 1914, the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a granite obelisk and headstones marked C.V. in the Confederate Memorial Cemetery to honor soldiers who died in the Confederate hospitals in Scottsville, and a monument dedicated in 2002 lists their names, units, and home states. Old Hall, a Federal-style brick two-story house built in 1830 by Benjamin H. Magruder and bought by Joseph Russell Beal in 1850, was commandeered by Merritt as his headquarters on March 9, 1865. A tobacco factory from the 1850s was partially burned by Union cavalry on the night of March 6, 1865, and a canal warehouse built about 1830 was also partially burned that day before being rebuilt after the war.