LaGrange
Union Supply Base
Federal forces occupied LaGrange during the war, 1862-1865, and made it an important supply base. Gen. William T. Sherman established his headquarters here when the occupation began in 1862. In April 1863, Union Col. Benjamin H. Grierson left here with a combined force of cavalry and artillery on an extended raid deep into Mississippi to disrupt Confederate supply lines before the Union advance on Vicksburg. Gen. Andrew J. Smith started from LaGrange with another Union task force in July 1864 in a northern Mississippi campaign that included the Battle of Tupelo on July 14. Col. Edward Bouton's brigade of U.S. Colored Troops was in Smith's command.
Many historic buildings associated with LaGrange's Civil War story still stand. Woodlawn, completed in 1828, was Sherman's headquarters and a Union army hospital. Hancock Hall, which was finished in 1857, served as Gen. Stephen A. Hurlbut's headquarters. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant stayed there during a visit to LaGrange. Slaves constructed Immanuel Episcopal Church in 1842, and it served as a Union hospital after the battles of Shiloh and Corinth. The Lucy Holcombe Pickens House was the birthplace and early residence of Lucy Holcombe, the wife of the antebellum ambassador to Russia and the wartime South Carolina governor Francis W. Pickens. her portrait appeared on Confederate currency.
"[LaGrange] was a neat little place of about a thousand people. The yards were beautifully improved, filled with evergreens and rare shrubberies. A fine college building crowned a gentle eminence to the east of the town and a Seminary for Ladies looked across it from the North. All is vulgar desolation now. The college and its twin buildings are used now for hospitals, and the churches are all appropriated to the same uses, with many of the private dwellings. The fences are all burned, the gardens trampled, the most elegant evergreens turned into hitching posts for Yankee horses, and all this in a town where there had been no strife of contending forces. It is a natural consequence of war." - Capt. Henry Forbes, Co. B, 7th Illinois Volunteer Cavalry, 1863
Marker is on Main Street south of Third Street (Tennessee Highway 57), on the left when traveling south.
Courtesy hmdb.org
