Fraley Field, Shiloh National Military Park

Markers:

The Battle Begins                                                                                        25th Missouri Infantry

Union Reconnaissance Patrol.  Here at 4:55 a.m. on April 6 [1862], the first shots of the battle were fired when Confederate pickets engaged a Union patrol from Prentiss’s division.  Fraley Field, where the Federals struck the Confederate line of battle is a short walk along the trail west of the tour stop.

– 2009 Shiloh National Military Park Brochure, Tour Stop 8.

Fraley Field.  The short trail west of this stop leads to Fraley Field where fighting commenced.  The battle began here at 4:55 am, April 6, when Confederate pickets engaged a patrol from Col. Everett Peabody’s brigade.

– 2010 Shiloh National Military Park Brochure, Tour Stop 7.

The Battle Begins: Fraley Field, Shiloh National Military Park

Here in Fraley Field, advance units of the opposing armies met for the first time just before dawn.  Confederate pickets on the high ground ahead opened fire on a union reconnaissance patrol which entered the field just behind you.  Here fell the first victims of Shiloh.  In the following 34 hours 3,400 more men would die or be fatally wounded.

Maj. Gen. William J.
Hardee, CSA

The fighting in Fraley Field and the surrounding woods lasted about an hour.  The Union Patrol was forced to retreat, as the first three waves of the Confederate assault swept forward.  Though not decisive in itself, this initial engagement gave the Union camps to the northeast warning that a Confederate attack was on the way.

The battle of Shiloh opened in Fraley field when Maj. James E. Powell’s reconnaissance patrol encountered Maj. Aaron B. Hardcastle’s pickets of the 3^rd Mississippi Infantry Battalion.

Maj. Gen. William J. Hardee, commander of the Third Army Corps directed the confederate attack which followed the skirmishing in Fraley Field.