Pickett's Mill

At Pickett's Mill, visitors and staff report gunfire and voices carrying across the field at dusk, and figures glimpsed moving between the trees near the ravine. On May 27, 1864, roughly 14,000 Union troops under General O.O. Howard attacked entrenched Confederate forces under General Patrick Cleburne here, two days after the Battle of New Hope Church; the fighting, often credited as an early instance of trench warfare, cost the Union about 1,600 casualties against roughly 500 Confederate losses, many of them in a ravine where the fighting was heaviest. The 765-acre site, now Pickett's Mill Battlefield State Historic Site, preserves original earthworks, the roads both armies used, and an 1800s pioneer cabin — considered one of the best-preserved Civil War battlefields in the country because it was never built over.