The Battle for (and to Preserve) Guilford Woods

Thank you for joining us this Saturday morning. 

The history-minded among us might know the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, when Gen. Nathanael Greene’s Continental Army squared off against Lord Cornwallis. Greene famously won by losing, inflicting such devastation on the British forces that they withdrew from the Carolinas.

Far fewer people know what happened a few miles to the south that same morning, before most of Greensboro was even awake. This “forgotten fight” set in motion a chain of events that would ultimately lead to Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown – and the ground where it happened may soon be lost to development unless a campaign now underway succeeds in time.

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The British “won” the Battle of Guilford Courthouse because, in the end, the Continental forces had to retreat under a withering British advance. But Cornwallis lost 25% of his men in the battle. He was in no condition to pursue the Continental forces and ultimately had to shift his focus to Virginia. 

Cornwallis had such a hard time pushing the Patriots off the battlefield because it wasn’t the first British engagement that day. Gen. Nathanael Greene had anticipated the British move towards Guilford Courthouse and stationed an advance force to the southwest – near the Quaker settlement of New Garden – with orders to buy time and give warning.

That force was commanded by Lt. Col. Henry Lee, known as “Light Horse Harry,” a 25-year-old Virginian who had distinguished himself as one of the Continental Army’s sharpest cavalry officers. (His son, Robert E. Lee, would later eclipse his fame.) With roughly 600 men, Lee watched the British approach and prepared to slow them down.

Leading the British vanguard was Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton, commanding a Loyalist force called the British Legion. Tarleton had cut a fearsome path through the Southern Campaign, employing brutal tactics against Patriot forces (he inspired the villain Col. William Tavington in the movie The Patriot).

Around 7:00 a.m., the two forces collided near the New Garden Meeting House along Great Salisbury Road (today’s New Garden Road). According to the NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, the fighting eventually drew more than a thousand men from both sides into close-quarters combat near the Quaker meeting house, with the engagement extending in phases for roughly two hours. Some American riflemen took up positions inside the meeting house itself, firing through its openings.

Lee ultimately pulled his men back when it became clear that most of Cornwallis’s army had arrived on the field. The British then paused to refit and tend to their casualties before resuming the march north. They reached Greene’s main line at the battle of Guilford Courthouse around midday.

For generations, historians treated New Garden as nothing more than a minor skirmish. But a Guilford College alumnus and history professor, Algie Newlin, established in 1977 just how consequential those two hours had been. Lee had done exactly what Greene needed. Two hours of hard fighting left the British fatigued, their ranks thinned, their momentum disrupted – and Greene with the time he needed to arrange his men for what was coming.

Guilford Courthouse would prove to be among the costliest engagements the British fought in the South. New Garden is a significant part of the reason why.

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The Guilford Woods tract – 120 acres of mature hardwood forest on the edge of Guilford College’s campus – sits directly within this history. The college grounds were the terrain across which Tarleton’s forces maneuvered and fell back during the morning engagement. 

But the history is only part of what makes this land significant. The federal government designated Guilford Woods in 2017 as one of the earliest documented sites in the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, recognizing the role Quaker abolitionists played in helping freedom seekers move north.

The woods are now at risk. Surrounded by development on all sides, the tract could be lost permanently. That is the problem Piedmont Land Conservancy’s Saving Guilford Woods campaign wants to solve.

The Conservancy hopes to buy development rights from Guilford College and hold the land in perpetual trust, safe from development. The college would retain ownership and continue to use the land for its educational mission. As part of the arrangement, the public would gain formal trail access for the first time. 

The campaign is targeting $8.5 million, with $5.5 million already raised. The deadline is December 2027.

245 years after soldiers bled in those woods, the trees are still standing. The question now is whether they’ll be standing in another fifty years, or whether the next generation of Greensboro residents will find a subdivision there. Piedmont Land Conservancy and Guilford College have a plan to prevent that, and a deadline to do it. 

To learn more or support the campaign, visit piedmontland.org/savingguilfordwoods.