Longstreet's Billet

Longstreet was in East Tennessee because Braxton Bragg wanted him away from the army. After Chickamauga, Longstreet joined an attempt to oust Bragg, and Bragg detached his troops and sent them to retake Knoxville. Longstreet lost the footrace to Ambrose Burnside, besieged the city for eighteen days, and ordered an assault on Fort Sanders on November 29 that was repulsed with heavy casualties. News of Bragg's rout at Chattanooga ended the siege. His corps then retreated into winter quarters in upper East Tennessee, around Russellville.

What the plaque says

Longstreet's Billet Lt. Gen. James Longstreet's Corps occupied this area during the winter of 1863-64, with the mission of securing east Tennessee to the Confederacy. He and his staff occupied this house at that time. Brig. Gen. Kershaw's troops were to the north of the road, and McLaws' Division to the south. McLaws lived at Hayslope.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rogersville Historic District — 15 mi
  Tennessee's first newspaper was printed in this Hawkins County seat in 1791, and Swift Memorial College, founded in 1883, educated Black students after the state's 1901 law forced Maryville College to expel them.
• Andrew Johnson National Historic Site — 21 mi
  The tailor shop, homestead and grave of the seventeenth president in Greeneville, where the people he enslaved are named and where the Eighth of August emancipation celebration took root.
• Vardy Community Museum — 22 mi
  A 1899 Presbyterian church in Hancock County, now a museum, beside the Mahala Mullins cabin and the ruins of the Vardy school that educated the Melungeon children of Newman's Ridge.

More markers nearby

• Hayslope — 0.2 mi
• Mulberry Grove — 6.1 mi
• Morristown College — 6.1 mi
• Morris Cemetery — 6.2 mi