Old Town Creek Fight

The last fighting of the Battle of Tupelo took place late on 15 July 1864 where the road from Tupelo to Ellistown crossed Old Town Creek, and it cost Nathan Bedford Forrest a wound that kept him out of action for three weeks. After beating off the Confederate assaults at Harrisburg on 14 July, the Union commander, Major General Andrew J. Smith, short of food and ammunition in punishing heat, started his army north toward Memphis on the afternoon of the 15th. His leading division crossed the creek on what one account called a rickety old bridge and camped on the ridge beyond, with the wagon train corralled in the creek bottom and Mower's division still marching up behind.

Around five o'clock Abraham Buford's Confederate cavalry, about 1,000 men, came up the road from Harrisburg, took the ridge south of the creek, and turned the four guns of Rice's battery on the corral and the crossing. Union cavalry fell back in confusion and teamsters panicked, but two infantry brigades recrossed the stream, waist-deep in places by one soldier's account, and drove the attackers back through a cornfield and off the ridge. Forrest rode up as his line was giving way and was shot in the right big toe. Rumours spread that he had been killed, and he answered them by riding along the lines in his shirt sleeves. Smith marched on to Ellistown the next morning. In 1969 the Park Service historian Edwin C. Bearss recommended the crossing of Old Town Creek as the best place on the parkway to tell the whole campaign. The Park Service now directs visitors to the fight at a site on Mount Vernon Road, by the old crossing; its Old Town Overlook on the parkway is about 1.4 kilometres downstream.