Colonial Williamsburg asking descendants of South Carolina soldier to provide DNA to determine whether he was among 4 Confederates buried near Powder Magazine

2023 excavation of graves (The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation); 1907 view of church and Powder Magazine (Harry Mann photos, Special Collections Research Center, Swem Library, William & Mary); Battle of Williamsburg (LOC)

Last fall, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation mailed out a handful of letters, the correspondence topped by a drawing of the old Virginia Capitol and beneath it the words: “That the future may learn from the past.”

The heading read: RE: Potential Ancestral Connection to Skeletal Remains at Colonial Williamsburg.

Contained in the letter’s five paragraphs was a request that must have jolted the recipients and, if they complied, help fulfill the mission of making the past relevant.

The letter explained the remains of four Confederate soldiers had been found in 2023 in a pit and grave near the history site’s Powder Magazine. They died from wounds suffered in the May 5, 1862, Battle of Williamsburg. Further, the letter stated, a handwritten list of those treated at a makeshift hospital – established in a Baptist church near the magazine – still exists.

Then the inquiry became very personal.

“We are reaching out to you because our genealogist has identified you, based on publicly accessible data sources, as a descendant of … one of the soldiers who is named on the hospital list.” That individual mentioned in the letter believed to be among the four remains.

One of Isabella T. Sully's hospital patient list pages she recorded at Williamsburg Baptist (Tucker-Coleman Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Swem Library, William & Mary)

“If this matches your understanding of your family tree, would you be willing to participate in a DNA study to help confirm the name of this individual?,” the letter continued.

Four descendants said yes. On March 2, a kit was mailed out to each. The recipients will provide DNA from their cheeks and mail the swabs back for analysis.

Their presumed ancestor, says Jack Gary, executive director of archaeology at Colonial Williamsburg, was from the Piedmont region of South Carolina. DNA analysis showed him to be in his 20s. The infantryman was mortally wounded in fighting at Fort Magruder.

The South Carolinian has the most robust family tree of the four, and the project decided to confirm his identity first, aiming the letters at his kin. The soldiers’ names are being withheld for now as research and analysis continues.

Hospital list made the search possible

Gary, who signed the letter and heard from one descendant within a few days, said the endeavor has already been remarkable -- with much more to learn.

“I have not experienced this in my career,” he told the Picket in a recent phone call. “Not many archaeologists have used DNA this way.”

Final resting place for four soldiers at Cedar Grove Cemetery (The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)

Gary’s team -- which includes staff archaeologist Eric Schweickart,  lab technician Evan Bell and Elizabeth Drembus, a genealogist at William & Mary -- are the beneficiaries of good fortune in their hunt to put names to the four sets of remains, which were buried last year at the city’s Cedar Grove Cemetery, near the graves of other Confederates killed in the battle.

Working from the hospital list, census, newspaper accounts, the ledger of an undertaker and other records, the team narrowed the possible identities to four men who served in regiments from Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina and Virginia.

Without those documents, the effort would never have gotten off the ground.

“You have to have a known person to go off to trace their ancestry to the modern day,” said Gary (right, at another dig. Photo Colonial Williamsburg Foundation).

The list of names, made by a widow who visited the hospital and later raised money to rebury scores of Rebel soldiers who died at Williamsburg, was especially crucial.

It provided names and regiments of more than 60 soldiers and notes indicating if and when they died. Colonial Williamsburg did not see the hospital list until after the graves were found in 2023. Bell stumbled across it while doing research and the discovery opened the door.

Bell studied two versions to winnow the list of possible candidates down to the four soldiers.

Gary said, if the attempt to identify the remains is successful, descendants will know precisely what happened to the soldiers after they were sent to Virginia to fight. That knowledge will fill in gaps for each of their stories. Somehow, these four warriors were left behind when other hospital dead were moved to cemeteries.

Another aim is to eventually publish all four confirmed names.

“We should try to put a name back with the individual out of respect for human dignity,” Gary said of the South Carolinian. “If this is the man who we think this is, it will be incredibly rewarding.”

At Williamsburg, soldiers first saw the elephant

Hancock's Federal troops launch attack on May 5, 1862 (Library of Congress)

The inconclusive Battle of Williamsburg was the first pitched battle of the Peninsula Campaign, following a Confederate retreat from Yorktown. Most of the combatants had seen little or no action before the clash.

Federal Brig. Gen. Joseph Hooker’s division attacked the Southerners at Fort Magruder, but was repulsed. Confederate counterattacks ultimately failed and they made a nighttime withdrawal toward Richmond. Casualties numbered more than 3,800.

Federal forces took the city, holding it for the rest of the war. A few hospitals sprang up to handle the influx of wounded on both sides.

Williamsburg Baptist Church, which was formed in the early 19^th century, had already been pressed into service before the battle, treating sick Confederates soldiers stationed at Fort Magruder and elsewhere.

Historic courthouse (left), the Powder Magazine and old Williamsburg Baptist church (right) / Special Collections, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

It received the largest crush of the wounded. 

The church, which moved to a new location in the 1930s, kept no records during the Civil War. But an article provided to the Picket by church office administrator Haley Matthews claims the old site was “greatly abused” during the chaos following the battle.

“Bloodstains were on the floors and the pews were stored in an open shed exposed to the weather. Soldiers were buried in the church yard near the west door, as many as 17 in one grave. Their bodies were afterwards removed to the cemetery.”

The 2023 surprise discovery at the Powder Magazine proved not all had been relocated.

Isabella Sully is the story's primary hero 

The Confederates treated at the Baptist church hospital were prisoners of war. The Union forces wanted to move those well enough to Fort Monroe.

But dozens, including these four, were grievously wounded and could not be sent elsewhere. Many died in the days and weeks following the battle.

Local residents and clerics came to the hospital, to give comfort to the wounded and send updates to family members.

Among them was Isabella Thompson Sully, a widow from Richmond who had traveled to Williamsburg. She and friend Cynthia Tucker Coleman provided riveting accounts of the suffering, with Coleman calling one drunken surgeon the “Head Devil.”

A 1937 article in the journal Religious Herald mentioned the 17 soldiers interred in the churchyard near the west door, “buried like sardines in a box.” The author said an African-American showed him the graves years before and they were removed to a cemetery.

In 1892, Sully wrote a letter (left, click to enlarge) that appeared in the Richmond Times, saying 25 of the Rebel dead were buried in the green near the Baptist church. She described the dearth of medicine and food until the Union army brought supplies.

“I shall never be able to tell how we managed to keep so many wounded and starving men alive, so that several days elapsed before I was able to make a list of those who remained,” wrote Sully.

As more men died, they were buried in pits near the first 25.

Critically, Sully in 1862 recorded the names of the wounded, their regiments and company. Dying soldiers were worried about being placed in unmarked graves

She recorded the date of death and burial locations, when possible. She gave the list to Coleman, and the latter’s papers ended up hiding in plain sight at William & Mary's Swem Library Special Collections.

Archaeologists at Colonial Williamsburg were aware of a list, but they had no idea where it was.

'They said they was goin' to take them up'

Following the Civil War, Sully and others raised money to move scores of Confederate soldiers from the graves around the church to Cedar Grove and Bruton Parish Church cemeteries.

A post-1892 monument at Bruton Parish (photo below) lists names of men allegedly buried there, but some apparently were laid to rest elsewhere in the city. One did not die at the battle, said Bell.

Bell believes the burial parties got those in the larger pits and trenches near the Baptist church but somehow did not come across the four soldiers. “It seems like they just barely were missed.”

Interestingly, a formerly enslaved woman mentioned those four burials in a conversation that appeared in a 1933 book.

"It is a pity, pity, pity, for people to treat each other so bad. Lots of men were buried around the Powder Horn. They said they was goin' to take them up, but I ain't never seen them do it,” Eliza Baker said.

I asked why officials did not excavate the graves after Baker mentioned the lost burials. Colonial Williamsburg as a tourist attraction had begun to take shape by the 1930s.

Archaeology was focused then on the site’s architecture and buildings, Bell said.

In 2023, archaeologists were working around the Powder Magazine, which was being renovated. A reconstruction of the 1757 Market House had replaced the old Baptist Church nearby. Both were near Duke of Gloucester Street.

At a reconstructed wall, they came across a single grave and a pit containing three men. All four had all of their limbs. Nearby was a pit with three amputated legs. It was a real surprise, since most histories indicated the dead from the hospital had all been accounted for and moved.

“There is a cluster of men who died around the same time,” Gary recalls. “We assumed they died the same day or one day and the next day. You are not going to leave a pit open.”

The research team determined the four soldiers died on and around May 15, 1862.

Cynthia Tucker Coleman (left), a writer and preservationist who advocated for the restoration of historic buildings at Williamsburg, provided a vivid account of the occupation of the town and the hospital.

“The writer can never forget seeing a dead soldier wrapped in his coarse blanket lying in the vestibule of the Church, his body kept for a comrade to die that the trouble of interment might be lessened – A Confederate woman placed a white rose upon his breast and shed a tear for those who loved him at home.”

Her account is kept at the William & Mary library and can be seen online here.

Bell recalls the archaeologists sanitized their excavation tools and wore personal protective equipment (PPE) to keep their own DNA away from the remains. Some of the deceased had personal items. They were not buried in uniforms.

Experts were able to extract genetic material from teeth and skull bones. Subsequent DNA analysis showed one soldier to be in late 40s or early 50s. One was maybe 15 while another was in his 20s and the fourth in his 20s-30s.

“We had well-preserved DNA,” said Gary, who has a theory as to why the skeletal remains were in relatively good condition.

The courtyard area around the magazine was paved with shell. “It is possible that the shell changed the pH of the soil, making it less acidic.”

His detective work soon began in earnest

Bell got to work on figuring out who these four soldiers were. The journey had a few twists and turns, but the key was finding Sully’s pages, which are kept at William & Mary.

While Bell (right) was looking at documents relating to Cynthia Coleman, he asked one of the Special Collections assistants, Carolyn Wilson, about the hospital list. That’s when he learned the pages were kept in papers related to Charles Washington Coleman, Cynthia’s son.

He recalls thinking, “Oh, my God. This is the list Isabella Sully was talking about. The archivist there saved the day.”

Bell later found a somewhat similar list at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Va. The page is within the family papers of Samuel Blain. It is not known for certain who took those handwritten notes.

The Presbyterian minister visited the hospital and corresponded with the family of patient William Davis, who died in Williamsburg. The list at Washington & Lee helped Bell eliminate soldiers whose limbs were amputated.

The technician kept an Excel spreadsheet, ensuring the narrowed list did not mention men with amputations. He found some of the 60-plus patients at the church were buried elsewhere. Using the Blain list helped him cut the number of possibilities to 29.

Bell provided the Picket a breakdown of the numbers he used:

-- 66 names on the combined lists; this includes men who only stayed at private homes, not just the hospital.

-- 31 of the 66 survived Williamsburg leaving 35 men who died of their wounds after the battle.

-- 15 of the 35 have recorded burials or died in private homes leaving 20 men who died of their wounds after the battle, but do not have recorded burials. (At left, map of Fort Magruder, Library of Congress)

-- 5 of the 20 have recorded amputations leaving 15 men who died of their wounds after the battle, and did not have amputations. (11 of the 58 names on the Blain list have amputations)

That was how the list was reduced down to 15 names for analysis.

Death dates were key because three men were buried together, allowing the team to pinpoint soldiers who died about the same time.

 “We believe they were some of the first to die,” said Bell.

The four apparently were buried close to a wooden fence. “There is no space for any other burials.” That means they were off by themselves from other pits dotting the green.

Trying to bring closure more than 160 years later

The research team, which includes Dr. Raquel Fleskes at Dartmouth College, noted that the South Carolina soldier had no children but several brothers and sisters. They are in touch with male descendants of one brother. 

Those who responded to Gary’s letter have the same last name as the unnamed soldier, who died in his 20s. (Below, Powder Magazine, Wikipedia)

“If we can make a match with him we can likely confirm the other individuals,” said Gary.

Bell said the challenge with the other three soldiers is there are either few siblings to work from or almost no information available on their families.

Even if Colonial Williamsburg is unable to match DNA matches, the descendants will know their ancestors fought at Williamsburg and struggled for life in a field hospital before passing away.

“I want to see if my hypothesis is right and (we) bring closure to the descendants,” said Bell.

The result also could bring narrative stories to an American citizenry that doesn’t interact as much with history as they used to, he added.

Utoy Creek: The Atlanta Civil War battle of which you've never heard

As a boy growing up during the late 1950s and early 1960s in southwest Atlanta, Marc Stewart didn’t have to go far to find treasure.

He put a metal detector he received to good use.

“I found belt buckles in our front yard,” said Stewart, now 58.

Besides weapon parts, Stewart salvaged other accoutrements of Civil War soldiers: Buttons. Bullets. Insignias.

After a career in the U.S. Navy, Stewart now is an aviation artist, depicting planes locked in combat over the Pacific Ocean during World War II.

The Newnan, Ga., businessman also created two paintings from his childhood memories. One, “The Battle of Utoy Creek,” depicts Union soldiers from Kentucky attacking a hill held by Kentucky Confederates.

“That was right behind our house,” said Stewart. “I put the trenches where I knew they were on the hill.”

The neighborhood along Cascade Road was a great place to grow up, the artist said.

“I don’t think anyone really knew about it,” Stewart told the Picket.

He was referring to the Battle of Utoy Creek during the Atlanta Campaign.

From late July to late August, Federal troops made several thrusts toward the vital Rebel rail line in nearby East Point. Ultimately, victory had to come elsewhere, forcing Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood to evacuate Atlanta.

With the exception of a few historic markers along busy roads, a visitor won’t glean much Utoy Creek battle history and context.

Atlanta’s gorgeous Cascade Springs Nature Preserve (left) has no interpretation of the Aug. 6, 1864, battle that occurred among its rolling hills and trails. One sign warns against disturbing the soil for relics.

About a mile to the northeast, Beecher Hampton Nature Preserve, which includes a bike trail and Lionel Hampton Park, makes no mention of an array of rare Federal trenches (second photo, above).

“It is as good a set of trenches as I have seen anywhere,” said Barry Brown, heritage tourism specialist with the Georgia Department of Economic Development.

The trenches, hunted out for relics, continue toward the southwest corner of Westview Cemetery.

Brown, who then worked for the Georgia Civil War Commission, was awarded the 2007 Governor’s Award for efforts to help preserve Civil War sites. From 2001 to 2003, he coordinated the acquisition of 100 acres of historic land along Lionel Hampton bike path and Utoy Creek.

Co-author Brown included Stewart’s battle scene in the updated “Crossroads of Conflict: A Guide to Civil War Sites in Georgia,” which will have a second edition this summer.

Utoy Creek is an Atlanta battle of which few have heard.

The seminal “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War” makes scant mention. A National Park Service (NPS) summary makes no guess at casualties.

Regardless, the siege of Confederate lines made for at least two wonderful stories.

First, a brief history of the battle.

By early August 1864, Hood has suffered defeats at Peachtree Creek, Atlanta and Ezra Church, not far from Utoy Creek.

Union Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman had failed to get around Hood’s left flank at Ezra Church. He wanted to extend his right flank to hit the railroad between Atlanta and East Point.

He transferred Maj. Gen. John M. Schofield’ s Army of the Ohio from his left to his right flank and sent him to the north bank of Utoy Creek, according to the NPS battle summary.

After movements Aug. 2-5, Schofield (right) had to regroup his forces.

“The delay allowed the Rebels to strengthen their defenses with abatis, which slowed the Union attack when it restarted on the morning of the 6th. The Federals were repulsed with heavy losses by Bate’s Division and failed in an attempt to break the railroad,” according to the NPS.

On Aug. 7, the Union troops moved toward the Confederate main line and entrenched. Here they remained (photo below, trenches) until late August. Sporadic fighting occurred in the area for a couple more weeks.

Eventually, Sherman forced Hood to evacuate Atlanta after a loss at Jonesboro, south of Atlanta. The Yankees seized the railroad, cutting off Hood’s supply line.

Historians and experts somewhat disagree on the importance of Utoy Creek.

“Union troops charged uphill at well-entrenched Confederate lines and didn’t make it,” said Brown. “Sherman didn’t write it up in his memoirs.”

That wasn’t unusual. Sherman didn’t write much either of a costlier setback at Kennesaw Mountain six weeks earlier.

“Utoy Creek was a Federal defeat, but it was a small battle by any measure,” said Charlie Crawford, president of the Georgia Battlefields Association.

Maj. Perry Bennett, an Army historian with the 335th Signal Command in East Point, believes the battle was a bigger deal.

“The last 35 years I have been researching this,” said Bennett, who grew up in Atlanta and says he found three cannonballs in a Utoy Creek tributary when he was 12.

“Utoy Creek is described as a skirmish,” said Bennett, president of the Utoy Cemetery Association, which maintains a cemetery containing graves of Confederates who died in the area. The cemetery adjoins a church that served as a Confederate hospital during the battle and Federal siege.

“When you read the Official Records, your eyes become open,” said the major, who is writing a book manuscript on the topic. “This was a significant battle.”

Bennett is critical of Schofield, who contends the general had “the short man’s complex” and incorrectly blended units of the 14th and 23rd corps before the Aug. 6 attack.

“Sherman was exasperated,” said author and historian Stephen Davis. “The Confederates could extend the line as fast as the Federals could envelop it.”

Opposing Schofield’s much larger force in the Cascade nature preserve were about 3,600 Rebels on “no-go terrain.”

Instead of attacking, as they did in July, the Confederates sprang a trap on the Union troops, according to Bennett, forcing the forces in blue to withdraw after heavy fighting.

Bennett numbers the Union dead at 850, with about 1,000 wounded. Prisoners and regimental colors also were taken. About 35 Confederates were killed, and several hundred wounded, he added.

According to the GBA’s Crawford, Confederate casualties were about 30, Federal about 300. “The Federals probed the ever-lengthening Confederate line for several days in early August, with total Federal casualties for 4-7 August being around 815, Confederate about 385,” he told the Picket.

Much of the Utoy Creek battlefield sits in a verdant section of Atlanta featuring upscale neighborhoods and parks.

I walked the Cascade Springs Nature Preserve, where dog walkers roam trails. A spring house greets visitors in a ravine.

Portions of the battlefield and entrenchments also lie beneath John A. White Park and Greenwood Cemetery. A marker denotes a site on the 17th tee of “Tup” Holmes Golf Course off Campbellton Road (photo, above).

Willis Mill Road, named for a family that lived in the area during the Civil War, runs just east of the nature preserve.

Davis has researched a “bombproof” or “dugout” the family huddled in during the Atlanta siege and Battle of Utoy Creek. He determined it was located east of the nature preserve.

Davis studied notebooks and a ledger, kept at the Atlanta History Center, produced by Wilbur George Kurtz, a well-known artist-historian.

In 1932, Kurtz interviewed an older woman who recalled the bombproof.

“Mrs. D.E. Herren says that her father and some of the neighbors decided that to refugee before the advance of military operations would entail great hardships—certainly a loss of property, and the question of where to go and what to do when they got there, seemed unanswerable,” Kurtz wrote. “Deciding to weather the storm, they thought of the bombproof cellar, and built this shelter some days before the fiery blasts began sweeping across the fields.”

Up to 26 people huddled inside at the height of the fighting in western Atlanta.

“It was a big hole in the ground,” said Davis, whose works include “Atlanta Will Fall: Sherman, Joe Johnston, and the Yankee Heavy Battalions.”

Jacob Dolson Cox (left), a Union general, referred to the Willis family as the Wilsons in his memoir.

Cox on Aug. 11, 1864, wrote “In this bomb-proof four families are now living, and I never felt more pity than when, day before yesterday, I looked down into the pit, and saw there, in the gloom made visible by a candle burning while it was broad day above, women sitting on the floor of loose boards, resting against each other, haggard and wan, trying to sleep away the days of terror, while innocent-looking children, four or five years old, clustered around the air-hole, looking up with pale faces and great staring eyes as they heard the singing of the bullets that were flying thick above their sheltering place.”

Crawford and Bennett related another interesting story regarding the battle.

According to Crawford, the surviving Federal trenches may have been the headquarters for the 14th Army Corps, commanded by Brig. Gen. John McAuley Palmer.

“Palmer said he wouldn’t submit to Schofield’s orders because of date of rank,” Crawford said. After a flurry of messages among Palmer, (Maj. Gen. George) Thomas, Schofield, and Sherman, Palmer resigned and went back to Illinois. It’s a fascinating incident that influences the Utoy Creek battle.”

“Palmer was not a West Pointer, which also played into the argument,” said Crawford.

“It goes to tell you how screwed up Schofield’s plan was at Utoy Creek,” Bennett said about the flap, adding Schofield sent orders to Palmer’s subordinates during the faceoff.

Bennett said he devised staff rides for Army officers to study the tactics at Utoy Creek, including trench operations.

The conclusions: Mixing corps cost the Union unit integrity, Schofield did not have good intelligence on the enemy and Sherman goaded him to make an ill-fated attack at Utoy Creek.

The Army major quotes advice he said Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant once gave to Sherman.

“Never call an attack an attack if it is not successful.”

"Battle of Utoy Creek" painting courtesy of artist Marc Stewart; top trench photo, courtesy of Barry Brown.

• Part 1 of the Picket report on Utoy Creek

Part 1 of Utoy Creek: Restored cemetery shares story of Confederate hospital in Atlanta

His face ringed by perspiration, Malcolm McDuffie pauses from removing root knots on an unusually warm February day in west Atlanta.

Nearby, smoke rises from a pile of brush, wood and dead branches McDuffie, 68, and another volunteer have cleared at Utoy Cemetery.

Grave stone and markers in the city’s oldest burial ground provided witness to their toil in a tree-covered plot that a small, but dedicated, group is trying to return from neglect.

“We can make it a beautiful place,” says the website of the Utoy Cemetery Association, which contends the first burial dates to 1816, when this land was on the edge of Creek Indian settlements. White missionaries and settlers moved onto land that once belonged to an Indian village at Utoy.

McDuffie, who grew up in nearby East Point and now lives in Lilburn, Ga., guides a visitor through the cemetery, which holds the bones of between 25 and 35 Confederate soldiers who died at the Battle of Utoy Creek Aug. 5-7, 1864, during the Atlanta Campaign.

Utoy Cemetery also has the graves of Atlanta’s first physician, Joshua Gilbert, who had ties to the area and treated the wounded during the battle. By the 1820s, Gilbert’s family had purchased land lots in what once was Native American land. The doctor died at age 73 in 1889.

The Confederate defenders established a hospital at Utoy Church (also known as Utoy Baptist and Utoy Primitive Baptist), behind the battlefield.

McDuffie’s great-great-great-aunt, Sally Hendon, served as Gilbert’s nurse and also is buried at Utoy Cemetery, which features the graves of two Revolutionary War soldiers and a War of 1812 veteran.

The association vice president pauses at the marker for Exie E. Cochran. “I have a love for my grandmother,” he says. She helped to raise me.”

The cemetery adjoins what once was Utoy Primitive Baptist Church, which had moved to this neighborhood in 1828, before there even was a city of Marthasville, or, as it became later known, Atlanta.

Maj. Perry Bennett grew up in Atlanta, is an Army historian with the 335th Signal Command in East Point and is president of the cemetery group. He participated in a 1972 Cub Scout cleanup.

Bennett, 50, estimates 250-300 people, possibly including slaves and Native Americans, are buried there.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans placed markers at the Confederate soldiers, including a Jewish man from Savannah.

“I’ll find stones on his headstone,” says Bennett, referring to the Jewish custom.

Col. James S. Boynton (right), 30th Georgia, was wounded and brought to Utoy Church for medical care. He later became a politician and judge and briefly served as Georgia governor.

Bennett, McDuffie and others are working to have the cemetery added to the National Register of Historic Places. In June, they’ll go for state approval, with a National Park Service designation, hopefully, to follow.

Few Utoy Church or cemetery records survive.

The church, at Venetian and Cahaba drives, closed in the 1970s or early 1980s. The building now houses Temple of Christ Pentecostal Church. It’s not far from the Army’s Fort McPherson.

Bennett opens and closes the gate to the cemetery most days and regularly gives impromptu tours to people who stop by.

The Battle of Utoy Creek occurred when Union Gen. William T. Sherman, fresh off three major victories in July 1864, against Gen. John Bell Hood, tried to complete the job of taking the vital Southern city.

Sherman extended his right flank to hit the railroad between East Point and Atlanta.

“A delay allowed the Rebels to strengthen their defenses with abatis, which slowed the Union attack when it restarted on the morning of August 6th,” according to the National Park Service summary of the fight. “The Federals were repulsed with heavy losses by Bate’s Division and failed in an attempt to break the railroad.”

The siege of Atlanta continued.

Upcoming in Picket: A deeper look at the Battle of Utoy Creek and what remains today.

• Read about Utoy Cemetery Association