Lewisburg: The Town That Fought Back

Lewisburg sits in the Greenbrier Valley of West Virginia, a small town with a remarkably dense history packed into its few square miles. The Virginia General Assembly established it in seventeen eighty-two, though settlement here predates that by decades. This area was once called Fort Savannah, then Camp Union, then Big Levels, names that trace a frontier evolving from military outpost to courthouse town.

The town's most dramatic morning came before dawn on May twenty-third, eighteen sixty-two. Confederate Brigadier General Henry Heth led roughly twenty-three hundred soldiers across the Greenbrier River, intent on sweeping away the Union force holding Lewisburg. Commanding those Union troops was Colonel George Crook, outnumbered nearly two to one, with perhaps fourteen hundred men. Crook had served in the prewar Army and understood deception. He sent two companies forward as skirmishers, who fired and then fell back, deliberately. Heth read the retreat as a full Union collapse and ordered his entire force forward. It was a catastrophic misread. Crook's regiments were waiting on the flanks, and the Second West Virginia Cavalry thundered in and broke the Confederate line. The whole battle lasted ninety minutes; the decisive action was over in twenty. Heth suffered around two hundred forty casualties: sixty-four dead, eighty-six wounded, ninety captured or missing. Crook lost fewer than a hundred. The Confederates retreated, crossed the Greenbrier River, and burned the bridge behind them. Crook received his promotion to brigadier general shortly after.

Lewisburg survived the war and went on to become, in some circles, famous for a very different institution. In nineteen oh two, local citizens and the Lewisburg Female Institute raised funds to build a Carnegie Hall, one of more than two thousand five hundred libraries and public buildings Andrew Carnegie financed across the country. Carnegie contributed twenty-six thousand, seven hundred fifty dollars; the community added ten thousand more. The architects designed it in Greek Revival style with an Ionic portico, and the building opened as classroom space, studios, and an auditorium for what would become Greenbrier College for Women.

The college eventually closed, but the building endured. In nineteen eighty-three, local residents formed Carnegie Hall Inc. and rescued the structure, converting it into a performing arts center, gallery, and education venue. It is today one of only four Carnegie-funded halls in the world still in continuous use as a performance space. The others are in New York, Milan, and Dunfermline, Scotland. In a town of fewer than four thousand people, that is a remarkable legacy.