During the early days of the 1863 Gettysburg Campaign, a Virginia cavalry brigade under Brig. Gen. Albert G. Jenkins occupied the town and burned several warehouses and Cumberland Valley Railroad structures and the bridge at Scotland.

They burned ships and warehouses in New Bedford, skirmished at the Head-of-the-River bridge (approximately where the Main Street bridge in Acushnet is presently situated), and marched through Fairhaven to Sconticut Neck, burning homes along the way.

In 1760, the price of nutmeg in London was 85 to 90 shillings per pound, a price kept artificially high by the Dutch voluntarily burning full warehouses of nutmegs in Amsterdam.

Retreating, the Continental troops burned their workshops, mills and warehouses.

Union members and sympathizers cut telephone wires throughout the county, blew up bridges, scattered nails on roads to stop and slow truck traffic, fired shots at strikebreakers, burned warehouses, and set off small explosions in towns, villages and onion processing stations throughout the county.

When Richmond in April 1865 was evacuated by the Army of Northern Virginia, with orders to burn warehouses and factories, the Richmond Custom House survived the conflagration - a testament to its fire-proofing.

It was when a British force under command of Benedict Arnold, the American hero turned traitor, attacked New London and Groton, burning homes and warehouses in New London and then slaughtering troops at Fort Griswold on the Groton side of the Thames.

During the war, Burton lost the bulk of his fortune when Union forces burned several warehouses in Chattanooga, where Burton had amassed $125,000 worth of cotton.

The British force later withdrew under pressure from the main garrison of the island, burning warehouses containing over £500,000 worth of silk captured from British merchant ships.