At the beginning of the Civil War, Confederates fortified the high bluffs of Rainbow Banks on the Roanoke River. The fort helped prevent Union gunboat attacks in the upper Roanoke River Valley, guarded the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad bridge at Weldon that helped supply Gen. Robert E. Lee's army in Virginia, and protected the construction site of the ironclad ram CSS Albemarle just north of Hamilton. It was named for Confederate Gen. Lawrence O'Bryan Branch, a local hero killed at the Battle of Antietam, Maryland, on September 17, 1862. The bluffs gave the Confederates a great advantage over Union gunboats and essentially prevented Federal movement upriver. The fort was armed with 11 cannons and held provisions for a thousand men. Confederates began evacuating it on April 10, 1865, the day after Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, pushing the artillery into the river and destroying the magazine and commissary to keep Union troops from using them. In May 1865, the U.S. Navy retrieved three cannons, but interest in the other eight did not surface until 1972. A judicial restraining order stopped an Alabama group from salvaging three guns, and after a court battle the state won custody of the remaining pieces and placed them on permanent loan to the nonprofit Fort Branch Battlefield Commission. Through coordinated efforts by state agencies, four additional guns were raised from the river in 1977, accounting for ten of the eleven once there; the brass cannon remains missing.