The Seven Rangers of Prospect Hill
Near Front Royal, Virginia
High on Prospect Hill, above the town, stands a Confederate monument and a circular burial plot called Soldier's Circle. It marks one of the darkest days Front Royal ever saw. In September of eighteen sixty four, during the brutal final campaigns in the Shenandoah Valley, Union soldiers executed six of John Mosby's Rangers here in the town, and a seventh Ranger was killed soon after in a neighboring county.
Some of the condemned were shot, others hanged, and a placard was reportedly left warning that this was the fate awaiting Mosby's men. Popular tradition places the blame on the flamboyant young cavalry general George Armstrong Custer, and many accounts name him directly. Historians caution, though, that the exact chain of command behind the order is murky, and the surviving paper trail does not cleanly pin the killings on any single officer.
What is not in dispute is Mosby's response. Enraged, he sought and received permission to retaliate, and in November his men drew lots among captured Federal prisoners and executed several in kind, measure for measure. After that grim exchange, both sides stopped.
A monument raised on Prospect Hill in eighteen ninety nine honors the seven executed Rangers, and hundreds of Confederate dead gathered from across Warren County rest in the circle nearby.
