The Battle of Musgrove Mill, August 19, 1780, occurred near a ford of the Enoree River, near the present-day border between Spartanburg, Laurens and Union Counties in South Carolina. During the course of the battle, 200 Patriot militiamen defeated a combined force of approximately 300 Loyalist militiamen and 200 provincial regulars.
By the summer of 1780, the war that raged in the backcountry of South Carolina had effectively become America’s first civil war. Few men engaged on either side had ever seen Great Britain, and backcountry fighting tended to be especially brutal and retaliatory.