Battle of Rivers Bridge

Front: On February 2-3, 1865, as Gen. W.T. Sherman’s Federals advanced toward Columbia, units of Gen. F.P. Blair’s XVII Corps attempted to cross the Salkehatchie River at Rivers Bridge. The Confederate defenders there, in Gen. Lafayette McLaws’s division of the Dept. of S.C., Ga., and Fla., delayed the Federals for almost two days. Each side lost about 100 men killed, wounded, or captured. Reverse: In 1876 local men reburied the Confederate dead in a mass grave a mile from the earthworks and formed the Rivers Bridge Confederate Memorial Association. Their annual services commemorated the battle and the Southern dead. The Association also preserved the battlefield, deeding it to the state in 1945 as Rivers Bridge State Park, now Rivers Bridge State Historic Site.