Battle of Droop Mountain, 1863: the last big fight in West Virginia

From the summit the Confederates could see the whole Union army spread out on the plain below, around the village of Hillsboro, two miles and more away. They had breastworks of logs, stones and earth, guns on the crest, and a road behind them that ran for miles along the mountaintop. What they could not see was the infantry column working its way through the woods to come at them from the side.²

Who won the Battle of Droop Mountain and why?

The Union won. Brigadier General William W. Averell's 5,000 men outnumbered John Echols's 1,700 Confederates about three to one, and while a feint held the Confederates' attention in front, Averell's infantry marched around through the woods and struck their left flank. When that flank gave way, the defense of the mountain collapsed into a rout.³

Background: a railroad and a new state

West Virginia joined the Union in 1863, but Confederate forces still held on in its south-eastern corner. The American Battlefield Trust explains why: the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad ran close to the state's south-eastern border, and as long as it kept running, a Confederate army could stay in West Virginia.⁴

Between August and December 1863 Brigadier General William W. Averell led three raids through the mountains toward the railroad near Dublin, Virginia. The first ended in August at White Sulphur Springs, where Colonel George S. Patton's Confederates turned him back. Droop Mountain was the result of the second.⁵

On 26 October the Union commander of the Department of West Virginia, General Benjamin F. Kelley, ordered Averell to march from Beverly on Lewisburg and capture or drive off the Confederate force there. A second column under General Alfred N. Duffié, from Charleston in the Kanawha valley, was to join him at Lewisburg. If it proved practicable, the mounted troops were then to push on to the railroad and destroy the bridge over the New River near Dublin.⁶

Armies and commanders

The Union. Averell's column was a mixed force of cavalry, mounted infantry, infantry and artillery, nearly 5,000 men, with two batteries. The plan was a pincer: Averell would draw the Confederates away from Lewisburg, while Duffié occupied the town and helped trap the Southern army.⁷

Averell himself was a career officer, a West Point graduate of 1855 who had served on the frontier before the war and had commanded cavalry in the Army of the Potomac. After Chancellorsville Joseph Hooker relieved him, and his posting to West Virginia, e-WV judges, amounted to a punishment. He would be removed again by Philip Sheridan in 1864.⁸

The Confederates. Facing them were Colonel William L. Jackson's command, posted near Mill Point in Pocahontas County, and Brigadier General John Echols's brigade at Lewisburg, with Colonel George S. Patton commanding its infantry. Echols reported about 1,700 men actually engaged.⁹

Echols, born in Lynchburg in 1823 and educated at Washington College and Harvard, was a lawyer at Union in Monroe County who had voted for secession at the Virginia convention of 1861. He had raised a company, fought at First Manassas and been wounded at Kernstown in 1862. After Droop Mountain he would command the Confederate right wing at New Market in May 1864 and serve under Lee at Cold Harbor.¹⁰

Each side overestimated the other. From prisoners' reports Averell and Kelley put the Confederates at about 4,000 men with seven guns; Echols believed he had fought some 7,000 Federals.¹¹

The battle in phases

4 and 5 November. Averell left Beverly on 1 November. On the 4th his men ran into part of Jackson's command near Hillsboro. Jackson warned Echols and fought a series of delaying actions, falling back on the 5th to the summit of Droop Mountain, where he made a stand. Averell pulled his advance back out of range of the Confederate guns and put off the attack until the next day.¹²

The night march. Echols set out from near Lewisburg in the small hours and reached the mountain early on the 6th after a night march. Fearing that the Federals might use another road to get round his right and into his rear, he detached a battalion with a gun to hold it.¹³

The Confederate line. On arrival Echols took command of the whole force. He placed his batteries just beyond the crest, where Jackson already had two guns in position, with the 22nd Virginia behind them in support and the 23rd Battalion on the right of the turnpike. From there, Echols wrote, his men looked down on the plain called the Little Levels and on the village of Hillsboro, and could see parts of the Union lines two miles or more away. Averell, looking up from below, described a northern slope farmed almost to the summit, two and a half miles from the foot, cut by strips of woodland and reached only over rolling hills and confusing ravines.¹⁴

The plan of attack. Averell judged a direct assault up the open northern slope too difficult. He sent a cavalry regiment and a battery to make a show against the Confederate right, while his infantry made a long detour through the woods to the right, to climb onto the ridge and strike the Confederate left and rear. His guns opened around 11 a.m. but did little damage.¹⁵

The flank march. The turning column was the infantry of Colonel Moor, his own 28th Ohio and the 10th West Virginia, with a company of cavalry. Averell's report and Moor's both describe a march of about 9 miles in a wide semicircle over the hills and through the woods; Averell adds that the guide sent with the column proved worthless, so Moor steered by the sound of the guns. Moor wrote that his men crossed the open valley without being seen, and Echols admitted that the attackers on his left were so well hidden in the woods that he could not at first judge their strength.¹⁶

1:45 p.m. The sound of firing on the Confederate left told Averell that his infantry had arrived. He sent his three regiments of dismounted mounted infantry, the 2nd, 3rd and 8th West Virginia, obliquely up the face of the mountain against the center. They charged into deadly fire from above and, at the Confederate line, won a brutal hand-to-hand fight.¹⁷

Turning point: the Confederate left gives way

On the Confederate left the fighting became severe. Echols fed in reinforcements, first a battalion and then three companies of the 22nd Virginia, and sent Colonel Patton to take command there; the Trust has Patton holding up the Federal advance in the center for a time. Around 3 p.m. a Union signal detachment from the 68th New York Infantry reported that the Confederate line was failing, and Averell threw in his last reserve.¹⁸

In the woods on the Confederate left the two sides met almost blind. Moor reported that trees and thick undergrowth let his men see no more than 25 or 30 yards ahead; Echols wrote of an enemy advancing under cover of thick woods and undergrowth. Each detachment Echols sent to that flank was soon asking for help, and each was pushed back in turn, while Moor brought the 10th West Virginia up beside the 28th Ohio and led both regiments forward until his line reached the open hill where the Confederate guns had stood.¹⁹

The Confederate left was bent back and the center began to waver. Following nearly six hours of artillery fire, musketry and hand-to-hand combat, the Union infantry broke the Confederate left, and the retreat became a rout. Averell reported that the Confederates were driven from the summit at 3 p.m.; Echols, that he ordered the retreat at about 4, his guns firing canister to cover it.²⁰

The retreat ran along a narrow road on top of the mountain for about four miles, and Echols admitted some confusion when the horse holders of his dismounted cavalry took fright. His guns stayed in action until most of the infantry had gone, and a cavalry rear guard held off the pursuing Federal horsemen. Averell sent a battalion and two guns after the fugitives, and his whole command followed until dark; Moor's infantry marched another six miles before it bivouacked by the road.²¹

Aftermath

Averell chose not to press the beaten Confederates hard that evening. Lewisburg was still 20 miles away, and he wrote that he hoped the enemy would loiter on the road and be caught the next day between his column and Duffié's. Instead Echols kept marching through the night. The Trust sums up the result: the Federals took Lewisburg but failed to capitalize on their success.²²

Echols then learned that Duffié was only 18 miles west of lightly defended Lewisburg. After a grueling night march his men passed through the town before dawn on the 7th and fell back toward the Virginia border. Duffié entered Lewisburg that morning, and Averell arrived later the same day.²³

The count of the dead depends on whose figures are used. The National Park Service estimates 415 casualties, 140 Union and 275 Confederate; the Union return printed in the Official Records lists 119, and the American Battlefield Trust, using that return, puts the total at 394. Echols gave his own loss as 275 killed, wounded and missing, including men who later returned; Averell put the Confederate killed and wounded at about 250, and Kelley at 400 to 600.²⁴

Many of the wounded stayed near the field. When Moor's column marched back north after the battle, it collected 55 wounded Union soldiers and one Confederate at Hillsboro and carried them in ambulances and wagons; those too badly hurt to travel were left behind with an assistant surgeon of the 10th West Virginia and whatever rations and medicines could be spared.²⁵

The Federals took Lewisburg but went no further. The road south was blocked with felled trees, Duffié reported his men unfit for more marching, and Averell turned his mounted troops for home, reaching New Creek on 17 November. The Park Service notes that the reunited Union columns were in no condition to continue the raid, and the Trust says the operation was judged a failure because Echols escaped and the railroad kept running.²⁶

The Confederates came straight back. Their department commander, Samuel Jones, reported that the brigade was rearmed and reoccupied its old positions within four days; e-WV says within ten. Echols wrote that the results of the expedition for the enemy amounted to nothing.²⁷

Legacy and memory

Yet the battle mattered. In the Park Service's words, after it Confederate resistance in West Virginia collapsed. The Trust calls it the largest battle in the state and one of the last major ones of the war there, and notes that Averell's next raid, in December, did reach the railroad: e-WV records that this Salem Raid partly destroyed the Virginia and Tennessee line, and that Averell regarded it as the greatest success of the three.²⁸ › Battle of Chickamauga, 1863

One name on the Confederate side carried forward. Colonel George S. Patton, a Virginia Military Institute graduate of 1852 and a Charleston lawyer, commanded the 22nd Virginia Infantry and, at Droop Mountain, bought time for the guns and wagons to escape. He was killed at Winchester in September 1864. His grandson and namesake, George S. Patton Jr., led American troops in North Africa, Sicily and Europe in World War II.²⁹

Visiting today

The field is now Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park, West Virginia's first state park. The West Virginia Fish and Game Commission bought it on 14 April 1928 and dedicated it on 4 July that year. From 1935 the Civilian Conservation Corps turned it into a park, laying out footpaths that lead past battle graves, breastworks and monuments.³⁰

The park, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has a small museum with Civil War rifles, uniforms and letters, an observation tower with a view over the Greenbrier valley, and trails with signs that follow the troop movements. In even-numbered years it hosts a re-enactment of the battle.³¹