Battle of Cove Mountain: Protecting the Confederacy's Iron Lifeline

In the spring of eighteen sixty-four, as Ulysses Grant was coordinating simultaneous Union offensives across multiple fronts, a smaller but strategically vital campaign was playing out in the mountains of southwest Virginia.

The Virginia and Tennessee Railroad was the Confederacy's industrial spine in the region, connecting the lead mines near Wytheville and the salt works at Saltville to Richmond and the Confederate armies. Without lead there were no bullets. Without salt there was no preserved meat. Union commanders understood this, and in May of eighteen sixty-four they sent two cavalry columns into the mountains to destroy it.

Brigadier General William Averell commanded one of those columns. On May tenth his troopers reached Cove Mountain in Wythe County, where they collided with Confederate cavalry under Brigadier General William Jones, known to his men as Grumble Jones for his famously sour temperament, and reinforcements from the command of Brigadier General John Hunt Morgan.

Averell attacked and was repulsed. Morgan's men counterattacked and drove the Union cavalry back through Crockett's Cove. Seventeen of Averell's most severely wounded men were left behind in the local Presbyterian church, where local residents found them the next morning and gave them what care they could.

Averell retreated to West Virginia, the lead mines at Wytheville never reached. The Confederates claimed it as a victory, though the National Park Service calls the fight indecisive. Within months the overall situation in Virginia would shift decisively, and no mountain skirmish could change the trajectory of the war. The cove itself is still there, quiet farmland beneath the ridgeline, one of hundreds of forgotten engagement sites scattered across the Appalachian uplands.