Stumpy's Hollow
Near Harpers Ferry, West Virginia
On the morning of July second, eighteen sixty-one, in the first weeks of the Civil War, a young Confederate cavalry officer named James Ewell Brown Stuart captured a whole company of Union soldiers almost single-handedly, right here at a spot the locals called Stumpy's Hollow. A Pennsylvania company had stacked their rifles by a split-rail fence to rest while their captain scouted the road ahead.
Stuart, separated from his own men rode straight into them. Realizing a fight would get him killed, he bluffed. He bellowed at the startled Pennsylvanians to lay down their arms or be shot. Confused and leaderless, almost all of them obeyed. A few who hesitated were hit as Stuart's troopers finally arrived. He took dozens of prisoners with little more than nerve and a loud voice, an early glimpse of the daring that would make him famous.
