From Stonewall Jackson's 1862 Valley Campaign, to Robert E. Lee's drive toward Gettysburg, and Philip Sheridan's 1864 Shenandoah Campaign...

the enchanting Shenandoah Valley became a valued pawn in this most uncivil war. To the embattled and hard-pressed South, the Valley was a land of plenty – this "Breadbasket of the Confederacy" was filled with grain, dotted with mills and linked by road and railroad with a main theatre of war across the Blue Ridge. Its ability to feed armies and its geographic location in relation to the opposing capitals — Richmond and Washington — made the Valley strategically significant. Indeed, certain hills and fields were contested time and time again... taken, lost and retaken by both sides.

After a series of small clashes in 1861, Shenandoah Valley residents first heard the great thunder of war in the spring of 1862 when Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson began one of the most audacious and brilliant military campaigns in American history, drawing thousands of Union troops from the Federal campaign to take Richmond.

Over the next two years, northern and southern armies crisscrossed the Valley until a turning point came in 1864 when Union forces embarked on scorched-earth operations that burned and laid to waste much of the Valley's agricultural bounty. The Confederacy had lost control of the Shenandoah Valley.

Throughout the war, the lines between the homefront and warfront blurred as battles raged in farmers' fields, filling churches and homes with wounded. When the curtain closed on this horrific conflict, much of the region lay devastated. The Valley was forever changed.

Learn more about the Shenandoah Valley's Civil War Campaigns