Collierville at War

A small town on a big railroad

In 1860 Collierville was a village of a few hundred people in eastern Shelby County, twenty-four miles east of Memphis, strung along the old State Line Road. A business directory of that year counted four churches (Baptist, Christian, Methodist and Presbyterian), a school, Masonic and Odd Fellows lodges, three stores, three groceries, a flour mill and a hotel. What made the town matter was the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, which ran through it east to Corinth, Chattanooga and the Atlantic coast. Whoever held that line held the supply route across the South. Federal reports of the war usually spell the town “Colliersville.”

In the spring of 1861 about eighty local men formed a volunteer company, the Wigfall Grays. They mustered in at Germantown on May 15 and became Company C of the 4th Tennessee Infantry. Within a year they were gone, to Shiloh, to Kentucky, and on with the Confederate Army of Tennessee to the end of the war. Their own war is told on the battle pages. This page is about what happened at home while they were away.

Grant on the Collierville road, June 1862

After the fall of Corinth, General Ulysses S. Grant moved his headquarters to Memphis. He rode there along the road from La Grange with only his staff and a small escort. About twenty miles out of Memphis he stopped to rest at the house of a man he remembered as “Mr. De Loche.” The 1860 census identifies him as Josiah Deloach, who farmed on the Germantown side of Collierville’s own civil district. A neighbor called, the host grew uneasy, and Grant rode on. Confederate cavalry under Colonel William H. Jackson, who had learned where Grant was, reached the junction with the La Grange road three-quarters of an hour after he had passed, and turned back with tired horses. Grant reached Memphis on June 23. He wrote later that if Jackson had gone three-quarters of a mile farther, he would have found him resting in the shade.

An occupied town

After Memphis fell in June 1862, Union troops took over the railroad and posted garrisons at its depots: Germantown, Collierville, La Fayette, Moscow, La Grange. From then until the end of the war, Collierville was an occupied town. The garrisons changed, from Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and Ohio, but some regiment always stood at the depot.

The fort. The Union army built a fort beside the depot. Its earthen walls stood seven or eight feet high behind a ditch, with a stockade, a magazine and a quartermaster’s building inside, and the brick depot itself was cut with loopholes to serve as a last strongpoint. Where exactly it stood depends on whose account is followed. The town’s depot marker puts it about three hundred yards northeast of the depot; a Confederate colonel who attacked it described a post of nearly fifteen acres immediately north of the depot; and the Town’s own Fort/Stockade marker stands on Walnut Street at Tom Brooks Park, beside the white frame church at 111 Walnut, built in 1885–86. North of town the 7th Illinois Cavalry kept a camp of about forty acres.

The depot. The depot of the war years stood on Center Street, north of the tracks, on two acres Peter Adams had given for it in the early 1850s. The depot that stands by the square today is a later building, from about 1902, moved there in the 1970s.

The hospital. The Union hospital stood on the north side of Rowlett Street near the first railroad crossing west of Center, and the dead were buried behind it, more than 120 graves in all. About sixteen men of the 100th Indiana died there of smallpox between March and May 1863. After Shiloh, wounded men came in by train and were cared for at the J. K. Waddy house on Walnut Street, which still stands, and in the Methodist church on North Main. In 1867 and 1868 the Union dead at Collierville were taken up and reburied in the national cemetery at Memphis: 50 known by name and 76 unknown, among them seven unknown U.S. Colored soldiers.

Living under occupation. The Union army held the railroad, not the countryside. Confederate conscription officers and irregulars came and went among the farms, and Union pickets stood on every road. Families needed passes to go anywhere. One survives at the Morton Museum, written at Collierville on August 14, 1864, by an officer of the 46th Iowa: “Pickets pass Mrs. Brown & 3 children thro’ the lines and return today.” She was Catharine A. Brown, mother of Corporal Merritt R. Brown of the Wigfall Grays, and the Browns’ home stood on Mt. Pleasant Road south of the railroad. A week later, on August 21, Forrest’s cavalry raided Memphis itself.

Her husband, Benjamin F. Brown, had died at home in occupied Collierville in September 1863. Their son was with the army in north Georgia, days from Chickamauga.

The war reached the town’s churches too. The Baptist congregation, which had moved into the village by 1857, saw its building destroyed during the war and did not build again until 1872.

The other Collierville companies

The Wigfall Grays were not the only soldiers Collierville sent to war. In the summer of 1863, Black men from the farms and camps along the railroad began enlisting at the Collierville post in the 2nd West Tennessee Infantry (African Descent), later the 61st U.S. Colored Infantry. Nineteen signed on the first day, June 10, ten of them named Maben. By the end of August at least 103 men had enlisted here, 51 in Company G and 52 in Company I. They knew what capture could mean: on May 1, 1863, the Confederate Congress had resolved that Black soldiers taken in arms would be handed over to the states, and their white officers put to death or punished at a court’s discretion. The regiment fought its first fight at Wolf River Bridge near Moscow in December 1863, and lost 38 men in battle and 318 to disease before the war was over. Their names are on the muster rolls.

Their officers took the same risk. Company G’s captain, Henry Sturges, had been a sergeant of the 4th Illinois Cavalry until June 29, 1863, eight weeks after the Confederate Congress resolved that white officers of Black troops could be put to death if captured. On July 13, 1864, on the expedition to Tupelo, Mississippi, he was shot in the right shoulder “while in command of my company.” He recovered and led Company G until the regiment was mustered out at the end of 1865.

No marker in Collierville names these men. In October 2026 a Tennessee Historical Commission marker was proposed for them, at the railroad platform behind the Visitor Center where they enlisted. A marker for their regiment was dedicated on the Madison County Courthouse lawn in Jackson, Tennessee, in 2021.

Sunday, October 11, 1863: Sherman’s train

That fall Colonel DeWitt C. Anthony held Collierville with six companies of the 66th Indiana, about 240 men, and the camp of the 7th Illinois Cavalry. About ten in the morning, Confederate Brigadier General James R. Chalmers struck the post with some 3,000 cavalry and artillery up from north Mississippi. One column overran the cavalry camp north of town and burned its tents, wagons and records. Others came at the fort from the west and south, and Chalmers’s guns went into position on the ridge south of the tracks, within six hundred yards of the depot.

Into the middle of it came a train from Memphis. On board was Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, with his staff and a battalion of the 13th U.S. Infantry, about 260 men, on his way east to help relieve the Union army besieged at Chattanooga. Warned by the Collierville telegraph operator, the train came on and stopped opposite the fort about noon. The regulars formed in the field in front of the works, and Sherman and his generals went into the stockade. A quartermaster of the 66th Indiana wrote home the next day that they “all came into the fort, and handled the musket.” Townspeople took shelter under the depot floor. Chalmers sent in a demand for surrender. On Sherman’s instructions it was refused.

A private inside the fort, James P. Campbell of Company E, 66th Indiana, wrote home two days later. The fight was “heavy for 5 hours,” he said. About two hundred men were inside the fort and the rest in the rifle pits and on the skirmish line. The Confederates had a battery of six guns, but most of their shells flew too high, and only one cannonball fell inside the works. “The fort is small.” The camp guards were called inside to guard the colors. His regiment lost four men killed, three of them from his own company: Francis Marion Cowherd; John A. Pinnick, killed while Companies E and D charged; and Green Hubbard, who died a few hours later. Pinnick and Cowherd were buried on the battlefield in the same grave.

For three or four hours the Confederates pressed the fort. They reached the train, took the horses from the cars, among them Sherman’s favorite mare, Dolly, stripped the coaches of saddles and baggage, and set fire to the rear car before a sally from the fort drove them off. By about half past three, with Union reinforcements close, Chalmers withdrew south toward Byhalia. Anthony reported Union losses of 110 killed, wounded and missing: in the 13th U.S., 10 killed, 27 wounded and 13 missing; in the 66th Indiana, 4 killed, 15 wounded and 41 missing. Chalmers reported his own loss as 3 killed and 48 wounded.

Dolly went south with a young Confederate lieutenant, James Bleecker, whose servant renamed her “Sherman” and liked to say his master had captured Old Sherman.

Sherman was back on the road east within a day. Within weeks he commanded the Union Army of the Tennessee, and within a year he had taken Atlanta.

Tuesday, November 3, 1863: Chalmers comes back

Three weeks later Chalmers returned with about 2,500 men, under orders from General Joseph E. Johnston to harass Sherman’s rear and break the railroad behind him. By then the ridge south of town was riddled with rifle pits. Lieutenant Colonel George W. Trafton held the post with eight companies of the 7th Illinois Cavalry. Word went by telegraph to Germantown, and Colonel Edward Hatch came up with his cavalry, among them the 2nd Iowa with Colt revolving rifles, and artillery. Hatch put the combined Union strength at 850. The attack was driven off, and Hatch’s men pursued the Confederates eight miles, to the Coldwater. Chalmers withdrew to Oxford and reported his loss at Collierville as 6 killed, 63 wounded and 26 prisoners. Among the prisoners was Colonel J. Z. George of the 5th Mississippi Cavalry, later a U.S. senator. For the 7th Illinois, whose camp had been overrun in October, it was a repayment.

Every fight at Collierville

The two big fights were not the only ones. Federal records list more than a dozen actions at or near the town between 1862 and 1864, most of them small: a dash at the pickets, a few men captured, a train fired on. Together they show what occupation meant on the ground. After each one is where the Wigfall Grays were that same day.

Oct. 21, 1862. Skirmish at Collierville; Col. Benjamin Grierson’s 6th Illinois Cavalry scouting the area Oct. 21–24. The Wigfall Grays: Falling back from Kentucky after Perryville (Oct. 8).

Nov. 5 and 8–9, 1862. Union reconnaissances from La Grange toward Collierville. The Wigfall Grays: On the march back into Middle Tennessee.

Jan. 28, 1863. Skirmish near Collierville. The Wigfall Grays: Winter camp around Shelbyville, after Murfreesboro.

May 20, 1863. Skirmish at Collierville. The Wigfall Grays: Camp at Shelbyville.

Oct. 11, 1863. Chalmers’s attack; Sherman’s train at the depot. The Wigfall Grays: In the siege lines before Chattanooga.

Nov. 3, 1863. Chalmers’s second attack, driven off by Hatch. The Wigfall Grays: Before Chattanooga, three weeks before Missionary Ridge.

Dec. 27–28, 1863. Skirmishes between Grierson’s Union cavalry and Forrest’s command at Collierville, La Fayette and Moscow, as Forrest broke out of West Tennessee across the Wolf River at La Fayette Station, just east of town. The Wigfall Grays: Winter quarters at Dalton, Georgia.

Jan. 13, 1864. Skirmish near Collierville (9th Illinois Cavalry). The Wigfall Grays: Dalton.

June 13, 1864 †. Skirmish near Collierville (113th Illinois). The Wigfall Grays: The Atlanta Campaign, in the lines near Marietta.

June 23, 1864. Skirmish at Collierville (52nd Indiana, 178th New York); about fifteen Union killed, wounded and missing. Confederates also attacked a train near La Fayette the same day. The Wigfall Grays: Near Marietta, four days before Kennesaw Mountain.

July 2, 1864. Skirmish on the Byhalia Road south of Collierville (detachment, 7th Indiana Cavalry). The Wigfall Grays: Falling back from Kennesaw toward the Chattahoochee.

July 24, 1864. Confederate cavalry hit the 6th Illinois Cavalry pickets on the railroad two miles west of town and captured three; a company of the 46th Iowa drove them off. Union: 4 wounded and 4 of the 46th Iowa taken. The Wigfall Grays: Atlanta, two days after the Battle of Atlanta, where one Company C man was captured.

Nov. 15, 1864 †. Skirmish near Collierville. The Wigfall Grays: With Hood’s army at Florence, Alabama, about to march into Tennessee, toward Franklin and Nashville.

† These two skirmishes appear in Frederick Dyer’s Compendium and in the War Department’s 1903 list of battles, but no report of either was printed in the Official Records. They are included because two independent lists record them; little more is known about them.

The men who weren’t there

On the day Sherman stood in the stockade at their home depot, the Wigfall Grays were nearly three hundred miles away, in the Confederate lines around Chattanooga, the army Sherman was on his way to help defeat. Through two years of raids and skirmishes at home, they were in Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama, and their families in Collierville lived under occupation without them.

After the war

The men who came home in 1865 found the old village nearly gone; the Town’s marker at the original site says that all but three of its buildings were burned or destroyed during the war. Collierville was rebuilt a short way to the southwest. On July 21, 1866, Virginius Leake and Harrison H. Irby laid out a new public square beside the depot, and the first lots sold that September. It is the square at the heart of the town today. The one building on it older than the war, the log Stage Coach Rest Stop of the early 1850s, was moved there in 1977.

The town took a new charter on February 17, 1870, and elected James B. Abington its mayor. That year’s census listed Merritt Brown, home from the war, as the railroad agent at Collierville, keeping the depot the new town had been built around. New institutions followed: the Christian Church on North Main, about 1869, now the Morton Museum of Collierville History; the Presbyterians, who came to Collierville in 1871; the rebuilt Baptist church, 1872; Bellevue Female College, 1873; and in the spring of 1878, Magnolia Cemetery, on land bought from Merritt’s brother, William J. Brown. That fall, yellow fever reached Collierville, and Merritt Brown was among its first dead. He lies at Magnolia with ten men of his company.

Where it happened

The town of 1863 stood along the railroad. The maps show where the fort and the depot stood in relation to the square that replaced the old village.

Sources

Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs (1885–86), ch. 27. U.S. census, 1860 and 1870, Shelby Co., Tenn., Tenth District. John L. Mitchell, Tennessee State Gazetteer and Business Directory for 1860–61. The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Ser. I, Vol. 24, Pt. 1; Vol. 30, Pt. 2 (reports of Sherman, Anthony, Chalmers and Richardson); Vol. 31, Pt. 1; Vol. 39, Pt. 1. Campbell Hay to his brother, Oct. 12, 1863, Indianapolis Daily Journal, Oct. 20, 1863. James P. Campbell to William Cowherd, Oct. 13, 1863, published in the Paoli News, 1931, as quoted on the Town’s “Ridge of the Attack” marker. James Dinkins, By an Old Johnnie (1897). Frederick H. Dyer, A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion (1908). War Department, Alphabetical List of the Battles of the War of the Rebellion (1903). Memphis Daily Bulletin, July 27, 1864. Diary of William L. Henderson, 46th Iowa, July 24, 1864 (University of Iowa). Muster-in rolls, Companies G and I, 2nd West Tennessee Infantry (A.D.), Tennessee State Library and Archives. Pass, 46th Iowa Infantry, Aug. 14, 1864, Morton Museum of Collierville History. Collierville Civil War Walking Trail markers (Fort/Stockade, Treating the Wounded, Ridge of the Attack, Original Depot, Original Village) and Tennessee Civil War Trails markers. Collierville Historic District, National Register of Historic Places nomination (1989). Leake and Irby marker (2006). Library of Congress, Sanborn-Perris map of Collierville, 1892. Compiled service record of Capt. Henry Sturges, Co. G, 61st U.S. Colored Infantry, National Archives. Slaves to Soldiers (Williamson County), “61st US Colored Infantry.”

The book

The story of Corporal Merritt R. Brown, the Wigfall Grays and their town is told in An Honor Unearned: From the Streets of Collierville, Tennessee, to Edgefield, South Carolina, by Michael Louis Meece. Available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. More about the book at anhonorunearned.org.