The Southern theater of the American Revolution turned sharply in June 1780. The British defeat at Ramsour's Mill on June 20 had scattered Loyalist forces across the western Carolinas. General Griffith Rutherford of the Salisbury District Brigade arrived two days later with more than 1,200 men, hoping to clean up survivors trying to regroup with British regulars elsewhere. Rutherford's army was already shrinking. Enlistments expired. Soldiers went home for the summer harvest. By the time he was within striking distance of his next target — a force of several hundred Loyalists Colonel Samuel Bryan was gathering near the Yadkin River — Rutherford had grown his force back to 600 men with new recruits, but the rebel army in the Carolinas was thin, improvised, and chronically short of manpower.

Bryan, an experienced Loyalist colonel, anticipated Rutherford's approach and withdrew down the east bank of the Yadkin River. His goal was to reach the British regulars on the Pee Dee. Rutherford gave chase. From Salisbury, he detached Colonel William Lee Davidson and a picked force to ride down the west bank in case Bryan tried to cross. Bryan moved fast — marching day and night — and reached the British line before Davidson could intercept. The chase looked like failure. Then Davidson learned that several hundred other Loyalists had gathered separately, just south of the Yadkin's junction with the Pee Dee, at a place called Colson's Mill. He turned his force toward them.

Davidson moved quickly to gain surprise. His plan was to surround the farm where the Loyalists had gathered, then close the ring. His front element was discovered before the flanking force was in position, and a firefight began at uneven distances across the farm. Davidson, the only Patriot officer in proper uniform, was the obvious target. A Loyalist sharpshooter caught him with a serious gut wound. His men kept advancing. Colonel Francis Locke assumed command and pushed forward. The Loyalist force — caught half-organized, far from British regulars — broke. Three were killed, several more wounded, and ten taken prisoner. Most of the Loyalists escaped through ground they knew well, the Patriot pursuers unfamiliar with the local woods. Only one Patriot besides Davidson was wounded.

Davidson spent two months recovering. The wound was nearly fatal, but he survived and returned to the field. He would die seven months later, at the Battle of Cowan's Ford in February 1781, shot from his horse while trying to delay Cornwallis's army crossing of the Catawba River. The town of Davidson, North Carolina, and Davidson College both bear his name. Colson's Mill was, in the arithmetic of his career, a minor wound that should have killed him — and probably would have, if the bullet had struck slightly differently. He served six more months on borrowed time.

Davidson's battle counted three enemy dead and ten prisoners — modest numbers, even by the standards of small frontier engagements. But the cumulative effect of Colson's Mill, following Ramsour's Mill the month before, was strategic. Active Tory support across the Carolinas, which Cornwallis was counting on to supply manpower for his northward push, evaporated. Local Loyalists who had been considering taking up arms saw what happened to the ones who did. Historian estimates suggest Cornwallis lost as many as 3,000 auxiliary Loyalist troops he might otherwise have raised — soldiers who never enlisted because the risk had become unacceptable. That number, if even half right, made Colson's Mill one of the most consequential small battles of the Southern Campaign. The mill is gone. The land between the Rocky River and the Pee Dee is still farmland and forest. The bullet hole in Davidson's coat, if it survived, is somewhere in family hands.