A member of the Sixth Iowa, who had been shot in the leg and laid helplessly watching on the battlefield for a couple days, returned to the area thirty years later and reported that the old log houses he remembered were all torn down and many new houses had been built over the area where they had camped and fought. Campgrounds were now cultivated fields, a store stood where the wounded were tended, and the trees were all gone.

An active lumber mill had been erected and had taken down most of the large trees, "almost devastated" the battlefield he says, and was still at work cutting them down at the time of his visit, so that the landscape bore very little resemblence to the place he knew. With the big trees gone, the whole area had been taken over by a dense growth of brush and bushes. Finally, he was able to recognize a familiar place: the twin burial trenches, almost side by side, thirty feet apart, for the Union and Confederate dead:

"One who was in the fight would scarcely recognize the locality, because of the cutting down of the large trees. The trench in which the Sixth Iowa boys were laid, and have since been placed in the national cemetery at the river, is plainly visible. The resting place of over 300 rebel soldiers, some two rods from that of the Sixth, is plainly to be seen, but without anything else visible to mark or identify the spot."