Shenandoah Valley Battlefields

Not one battlefield but an entire valley shaped by war — its fertile farms fed the Confederacy, its terrain gave Stonewall Jackson a legendary campaign, and its systematic burning by Sheridan's cavalry became one of the Civil War's starkest examples of total war against a civilian economy.

The Shenandoah Valley's fertile farmland made it a vital source of food for Confederate armies, earning it the nickname 'the Breadbasket of the Confederacy,' while its northeast-southwest orientation — running opposite to most maps' intuitive sense of direction — repeatedly confused Union commanders. In the spring of 1862, Confederate General Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson exploited that terrain in a lightning campaign, marching his smaller force up and down the valley to defeat a series of larger Union armies in rapid succession and tie down troops that might otherwise have reinforced the Union assault on Richmond.

By 1864 the valley had become a battleground again, this time centered on cutting off the Confederacy's supply line for good. At the Battle of New Market on May 15, 1864, Confederate forces short on manpower threw in a corps of Virginia Military Institute cadets, some as young as 15, to help hold the line. That fall, Union General Philip Sheridan's cavalry carried out a deliberate campaign of destruction remembered as 'the Burning,' torching barns, mills, and crops across the valley to permanently cripple its ability to supply Confederate armies.

Sheridan's campaign culminated at the Battle of Cedar Creek on October 19, 1864, where a surprise Confederate attack nearly routed Union forces before Sheridan personally rallied his troops for a decisive counterattack that effectively ended major Confederate resistance in the valley. Because the war touched so many sites across the valley's length rather than a single field, Congress in 1996 established the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields National Historic District, an unusual designation that protects more than a dozen separate battlefields through a partnership between a private foundation and the National Park Service rather than a conventional single park.