For two months in the winter of 1865 the spring at Gravelly Springs, in western Lauderdale County, anchored the camp of a Union cavalry corps tens of thousands strong. Major General James Harrison Wilson brought his corps to the spring in mid-January and kept it there until mid-March, spread out in camps from Gravelly Springs west toward Waterloo. He chose the ground, he wrote in his memoir, because it was near the head of steamboat navigation at all stages of the river, with high ground, plantation fields for drill, and wooded gravelly ridges with springs for the camps.
For the first time the corps went into regular cantonments, of rapidly constructed log cabins and lean-to stables. The numbers depend on who is counting. The state historical marker says 22,000 men in five divisions and calls it the largest cavalry force ever massed in the western hemisphere; Wilson wrote that by the middle of February there were 27,000 in camp, fully 20,000 of them mounted. His headquarters was the house of a sister of George S. Houston, later governor of Alabama, whose family had settled near Florence in the 1820s; the state marker names it Wildwood, a mile east of the spring.
On 22 March about 13,480 troopers rode south on what became Wilson's Raid, which burned the University of Alabama and took Selma. A detachment of the 4th Michigan Cavalry, which had wintered at Gravelly Springs, captured Jefferson Davis in Georgia on 10 May 1865.
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