Virginia Military Institute: The Field of Lost Shoes

Virginia Military Institute was founded on November eleventh, eighteen thirty-nine, on the site of a state arsenal in Lexington, becoming only the second state-funded military academy in the country after West Point. In its early decades it graduated men who would go on to fight on both sides of the Civil War, and no institution in Virginia is more thoroughly entangled with that conflict.

The faculty member who made the deepest mark on VMI arrived in eighteen fifty-one: Major Thomas Jackson, who taught physics and artillery tactics with a rigid, methodical precision that sometimes baffled his students. When the war came, Jackson became Stonewall, the most celebrated Confederate commander in the Shenandoah Valley. He never returned to Lexington alive; his body was brought back and buried in the town cemetery.

The cadets themselves earned their own permanent place in the record on May fifteenth, eighteen sixty-four, at the Battle of New Market, forty miles north of campus. Confederate General John Breckinridge was outnumbered by Union forces under Franz Sigel, and a gap opened in his line as his infantry was repulsed. Breckinridge hesitated, then gave the order that haunted him afterward: put the boys in. Two hundred and fifty-seven VMI cadets, most of them between fifteen and eighteen years old, fixed bayonets and charged across a freshly plowed field that had turned to deep mud in the spring rain. They lost their shoes in the muck as they ran. The section of battlefield where they charged has been called the Field of Lost Shoes ever since.

The cadets closed the gap, helped drive Sigel's Union force from the field, and took about forty-five wounded and ten killed among their number. A month later, Union General David Hunter burned the VMI campus in retaliation. It was rebuilt after the war, and the Corps of Cadets still parades in memorial every May fifteenth.