© 2024
Virginia's Public Radio
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Winchester

www.civilwar.org

Originally aired on November 10, 1995 - In part 63 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson describes the strategic importance of the town of Winchester. Here, five major battles and a dozen skirmishes took place during the conflict. 

#63 – Winchester

Down at the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley is the town of Winchester. Although it is today becoming a suburb of Washington, in Civil War times Winchester had an importance among Virginia communities second only to that of Richmond.

The Shenandoah River was never navigable. Hence, the Valley Turnpike was the major avenue through the agricultural kingdom immediately west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. That highway extended from Staunton to Winchester. It was a two-lane macadamized pike, paved eighteen feet wide with pulverized limestone packed tightly to make the roadbed impervious to precipitation. Road shoulders were two feet wide on each side.

No grade on the Valley Turnpike exceeded three degrees. In marked contrast to other highways of that day, the builders of the Valley thoroughfare had taken painstaking efforts to keep it as straight as possible. At many points, the Turnpike ran unbent for as far as three miles. The section between New Market and Mauzy was seven miles in length and contained a single curve.

The Valley Turnpike, overlooked by today’s travelers on the interstate, still exists. It is called US 11.

Its northern terminus was Winchester. Founded in 1743 by English pioneers, it was the first community of note in the Valley. Its street names (Loudoun, Cork, and the like) reflected the English influence. George Washington spent time there as a surveyor and later as a military commander in the French and Indian War. The village, a veritable crossroads for the northwest section of Virginia, came to life after the American Revolution as a market for goods travelling in every direction in the lower Shenandoah.

By 1861, Winchester boasted 700 families and a population of 4,400 happy citizens. It was three times the size of Lexington, Winchester’s counterpart at the other end of the Valley. A handsome county courthouse, market place, fifty mercantile stores, two banks, a dozen churches, and several taverns all stood along paved streets. Winchester had more than the average number of schools. It even possessed a medical college.

Nine roads converged there. A thirty-mile railroad connected Winchester with Harper’s Ferry and the mighty Baltimore and Ohio rail system. Winchester was not merely Virginia’s largest town on the west side of the Blue Ridge; its location made it the northern door to the Valley as well as the commercial, military, and psychological key to the entire Shenandoah.

How vital to both sides Winchester was in the Civil War can be told in a single, unbelievable statistic: in the four years of conflict, the town changed hands more than seventy times. Of course, many of those changes were momentary as a cavalry unit moved into one end of the town and forced a mounted enemy unit out the other end. Still, Winchester was in a class by itself where “shifting loyalties” were concerned.

Four times during the war, Confederate General “Stonewall” Jackson made the town his headquarters; and by his own admission, Jackson came to think of Winchester as a second home. Certainly no single individual in wartime held the affection of Winchester citizens more than did “Old Jack”.

The strategic importance of Winchester is evident from the fact that five major battles and a dozen skirmishes took place in and around the city. Some of those engagements – notable Kernstown, First Winchester, and Opequon Creek – were significant enough to alter the course of the war for the time being.

As one might expect, civil war devastated Winchester. A third of the homes and over half of the businesses were destroyed. There was barely a Winchester family that did not mourn a father, son, or brother who was a casualty of the war.

Today the battlefields are gone, but the cemeteries, the memoirs of civilians, and the reminiscences of soldiers form an indelible legacy of Winchester in another, and bloody, time.

Dr. James I. "Bud" Robertson, Jr., is a noted scholar on the American Civil War and Alumni Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Virginia Tech.