History
After Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea, he turned north through the Carolinas for the Carolinas Campaign. Confederate President Jefferson Davis met General Joseph E. Johnston in Greensboro, North Carolina, while Sherman had stopped in Raleigh.
Though Davis wished to continue the war, Johnston sent a courier to the Union troops encamped at Morrisville, with a message to General Sherman, offering a meeting between the lines to discuss a truce. Johnston, whose army was still an active fighting force encamped in Greensboro, realized it could not continue the war now that Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House on April 9. Johnston, escorted by a detachment of about 60 troopers of the 5th South Carolina Cavalry Regiment, traveled east along the Hillsborough Road toward Durham Station. Sherman was riding west to meet him, with an escort of 200 men from the 9th and 13th Pennsylvania, 8th Indiana and 2nd Kentucky Cavalry. The farm of James and Nancy Bennett was the closest and most convenient place for privacy. The first day's discussion (April 17) was intensified by the telegram Sherman handed to Johnston, informing of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. They met the following day, April 18, and signed terms of surrender. Unfortunately, they were rejected by government officials in Washington as they were more generous than those Grant had given Lee. The opposing generals met again on April 26, 1865, and signed the final papers of surrender, which disbanded all active Confederate forces in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, totaling 89,270 soldiers, the largest group to surrender during the war.
James and Nancy Bennett were like many families who suffered tremendously during the four years of war. They lost three sons: Lorenzo, who served in the 27th North Carolina, buried in Winchester, Virginia; Alphonzo, who is currently unaccounted for in the family history; and their daughter Eliza's husband, Robert Duke, who died in a Confederate Army hospital and is buried in Lynchburg, Virginia.
The Bennetts never fully recovered from the war, and by 1880, James Bennett died and the family moved to the new community of Durham to begin a life without him. The Bennett Farm was abandoned and fell into ruin, a fire finally destroying the farmhouse in 1921. In 1923 the Unity monument was dedicated on the site. In 1960 that the Bennett Farm site was fully reclaimed and restored by local preservationists. It was then turned over to the State of North Carolina and made a state historic site.
Read more about this topic: Bennett Place
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