Battle of Scary Creek: The Kanawha Valley's First Fight

In the summer of eighteen sixty-one, the Kanawha Valley of what would soon become West Virginia was a contested seam between two worlds: the planter-controlled east, which had voted for secession, and the Unionist western counties that wanted nothing to do with it. Control of the valley's salt works, river roads, and coal seams was worth fighting for, and on July seventeenth, eighteen sixty-one, it came to a fight at a creek with one of the more memorable names in Civil War geography.

Union General Jacob Cox moved east from the Ohio River with a force of roughly a thousand or more men, attempting to trap Confederate General Henry Wise's force in the valley below Charleston. Wise had placed his defense behind the steep banks of Little Scary Creek, with roughly eight hundred men under the local command of Colonel George S. Patton, the grandfather of the World War Two general.

Cox sent his men forward in a series of frontal assaults across the creek, and each attack was thrown back. The terrain was rugged, visibility was poor, and the Confederates used their elevated position effectively. Colonel Patton was wounded during the fighting, and command passed to Captain Albert Jenkins, who held the line through an afternoon of fighting.

The Union attacks failed, and the battle ended as a Confederate tactical victory, one of the few in that corner of the state. But General Wise made a decision that nullified the win: he ordered a retreat up the valley toward the Confederate supply bases in Greenbrier County. The withdrawal handed the entire lower Kanawha Valley to Union control without further fighting, including the critical salt works. The region would remain in Union hands for the rest of the war, and the western counties that fought for that outcome would formalize their separation from Virginia in June of eighteen sixty-three.