March 1865 brought relentless rain to Harnett County. The mud clung to everything. Union General William T. Sherman was marching north with over 60,000 battle-hardened troops. Confederate General William Hardee had to stop him. Actually, he just needed to buy time. Hardee deployed his outnumbered men in three successive defensive lines across a narrow neck of land between the Cape Fear River and the Black River swamps. This was a brilliant tactical delay. For two days, Confederate soldiers dug into the muck, checking the advance of Henry Slocum's Union XX Corps. It worked. Slocum's men stumbled into a bloody meatgrinder of canister shot and musketry at the first line, near the John Smith House. The fighting grew desperate. Hardee's men fell back from line to line, trading blood for hours.

This swampy ground is what the National Register designation protects. It is not just open fields. Bullet-shattered timber and old bloodstains still mark the historic structures standing on this ground. The John Smith House and the Lebanon plantation home both became makeshift hospitals during and after the clash. Surgeons amputated shattered limbs on dining tables while blood seeped through the floorboards. So many died. Local families buried the Confederate dead in Chicora Cemetery, a solemn plot established right after the smoke cleared. Over 1,400 men fell as casualties in those wet pine woods. By holding Slocum up, Hardee allowed Joseph E. Johnston to concentrate his forces further north at Bentonville. That set the stage for the last major Confederate offensive of the war. It was a doomed effort, though. Today, the preserved terrain remains remarkably intact, keeping that frantic, muddy defense from being forgotten.