Captain Jacob Roemer commanded the Thirty-Fourth Battery, New York Artillery, which was situated on the College Hill to the south of Fort Sanders.

The battery’s four three-inch (76 mm) rifled guns took turns firing from about 11 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 28, until dawn on Nov. 29 from the hilltop campus of East Tennessee University.

They thus served to remind the poised Confederate attackers that the Union troops were waiting for them, and inadvertently to keep Natalie, Leila Ellis’s servant/slave, agitated at her sleepless sewing all night long.