Wytheville Raid: The Town That Stopped a Union Brigade

You are passing through Wytheville, and in the summer of eighteen sixty-three this crossroads town very nearly changed the course of the Civil War.

The Virginia and Tennessee Railroad ran right through here, and along the New River valley at Austinville, about ten miles southeast, sat one of the Confederacy's most vital assets: the New River lead mines. Those mines supplied roughly one-third of all the lead cast into Confederate bullets. Destroy the railroad and poison the mine, and Confederate armies from Virginia to the Deep South would start running short of ammunition. That was exactly what Union Colonel John Toland had in mind.

On the morning of July eighteenth, eighteen sixty-three, Toland led more than eight hundred Federal cavalry down off the mountains from western Virginia. The raid had been carefully planned. But Wytheville was not the defenseless depot the Union expected. A mixed force of perhaps one hundred and thirty Confederate soldiers and nearly as many armed civilians had gotten word the column was coming. They took positions in houses, behind fences, in the courthouse yard.

As Toland's troopers pushed into the main street, fire came from every direction. The fight was close, confused, and brutal. Toland himself was shot through the heart and fell from his horse in the middle of the road. The Union column milled in the town for hours, burned several buildings, and tore up a stretch of track. But without their commander and fearing their retreat would be cut off, the Federals withdrew north toward West Virginia, and never touched the lead mines at Austinville.

Repair crews had the railroad running again within hours. The mines kept producing. And Confederate muskets kept firing.

Toland was reportedly buried in Wytheville at first, according to an account published in eighteen ninety-three. The rebuilt railroad depot still stands on Main Street, and Civil War trail markers tell the story of the day this small town, outgunned and outnumbered, turned back an eight-hundred-man raid and kept the Confederacy in bullets for another two years.