The covered wooden bridge of the East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad across the Tennessee River at Loudon was a strategically important rail crossing between Richmond and Chattanooga. The Confederacy relied on this railroad to move troops and to transport salt and lead from Southwest Virginia and copper and food from East Tennessee, and Confederate guards protected the bridge during the bridge burner attacks of November 8, 1861. On September 1, 1863, as Union Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside's army approached Knoxville, retreating Confederates burned the bridge to block Union cavalry, but Federal troops soon dismantled an engine, tender, and three rail cars, moved them across the river on a pontoon bridge, and reassembled the train on the Loudon side. When Confederates approached on October 28, 1863, Union troops ran the train off the Loudon side of the track into the river. The Confederates then regained the bridge site, established a rail base at Loudon with four engines and between 75 and 100 cars, and in December, as Union Gen. William T. Sherman's army approached Knoxville, ran the train equipment into the river and abandoned the site to Federal forces. The Union army held the site for the rest of the war, completing a temporary bridge by April 1864 and a more permanent bridge by November. In February 1865, Confederate naval Lt. Arthur D. Wharton and 19 others tried to destroy the bridge by boating down the river, but they were captured near Kingston. The railroad returned to private control in 1867. A Confederate redan on this side of the Tennessee River helped protect the bridge, both Confederate and Union troops camped and built huts on the surrounding hills, and the land was then part of the John Blair farm, where Blair's summer house still stands.