Plants have a remarkable capacity for regeneration. In Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis), the entire root tip—housing stem cells and specialized cells like the gravity-sensing columella—can be cut off and the remnant tissue will rapidly divide and differentiate to replace these missing identities. Despite some knowledge of the molecular mechanisms driving this process, the necessity of cell division in this context is not fully understood. Here, we define a timeline of the major steps in regeneration and investigate the role of division and chromatin remodeling in that time. We show that while cell cycle inhibition blocks regeneration, some partial reprogramming can still occur. We outline three broad processes during regeneration—ectopic stem cell niche gene expression, loss of remnant identities, and gain of new identities—and show that some reprogramming events like ectopic stem cell niche gene expression are division-independent. We find that the cell cycle is also accelerated during root regeneration, speeding up to nearly three times faster than in uncut roots. Moreover, we show that histone deacetylase (HDAC) activity is critical at the very early stages of regeneration, potentially preceding the role of cell division. Intriguingly, a one-hour treatment with the HDAC inhibitor Trichostatin A (TSA) immediately upon root tip removal is sufficient to significantly perturb regeneration, whereas a one-hour cell cycle inhibition is not. We propose that Class I HDACs are the prime mediators of this HDAC inhibition and implicate HDA19 as a potential regulator of early reprogramming in root tip regeneration.