Rutherford's Farm: Ramseur Attacks on the Martinsburg Pike

The road you are on right now, this stretch of US Route Eleven, was once called the Martinsburg and Winchester Turnpike. On the afternoon of July twentieth, eighteen sixty-four, it was the scene of one of the sharper small engagements of Jubal Early's Valley Campaign, a battle fought precisely because a Confederate general heard guns and could not help himself.

Early's army had just scared Washington, marching to the outer defenses of the capital before pulling back into the Shenandoah Valley. Union forces under General Horatio Wright were in pursuit. Cavalry under William Averell pushed south from Martinsburg along this road, looking for Early's rearguard. Early ordered General Stephen Dodson Ramseur to block the approach north of Winchester, but to hold defensively.

Ramseur heard Averell's guns at about four o'clock in the afternoon. He was a twenty-seven-year-old North Carolinian, a West Point graduate who had been shot in the right arm at Spotsylvania just two months earlier. He was aggressive to the point of recklessness. Believing he outnumbered the Federals, he ordered his division to attack, directly contrary to Early's orders. He was wrong about the numbers.

Averell's men were better positioned than Ramseur knew. The Confederate attack crumbled into chaos. Ramseur's division broke and fled south toward Winchester. They lost three cannon, several hundred men, and whatever remained of the initiative in that stretch of the valley for the next several days. Ramseur escaped, but Early was furious.

For the Union, the victory mattered beyond the numbers. After a summer of frustrations and Washington scares, Northern morale needed wins. Private John Shanes of the Fourteenth West Virginia Infantry charged a Confederate field piece alone, ahead of his comrades, and silenced it. He received the Medal of Honor for that act on this ground.

Ramseur died three months later, shot through the lungs at Cedar Creek, on the same road, twelve miles to the south.