Saturday, January 23, 2016

Diary of 5th Sergeant Alexander G. Downing: Friday, March 3, 1865

It is still raining. We left our dismal camp at 7 a. m. and marched eleven miles, going into bivouac near Cheraw. The First Division of the Seventeenth Corps drove the rebels out of their works on Thompson creek and on through Cheraw and across the Great Pedee river. They captured seventeen cannon, three thousand stand of small arms and a number of prisoners. Cheraw is quite a business town and had been a manufacturing center for the rebel army. It is at the head of navigation on the Great Pedee river and has a railroad running to Charleston, South Carolina.

Source: Alexander G. Downing, Edited by Olynthus B., Clark, Downing’s Civil War Diary, p. 258

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