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

West Virginia joined the Union in 1863, but Confederate forces still held on in its southeastern corner. The American Battlefield Trust explains why: the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad ran close to the state's southeastern border, and as long as it kept running, a Confederate army could stay in West Virginia.²

That fall the Union commander of the Department of West Virginia, General Benjamin F. Kelley, ordered Brigadier General William W. Averell to strike at the line, with the capture of Lewisburg as the main goal. Terry Lowry, author of a book on the battle, writes in e-WV, the West Virginia encyclopedia, that between August and December 1863 Averell led three raids through the mountains toward the railroad near Dublin, Virginia. Droop Mountain was the result of the second.³

A pincer that did not close

The plan was a pincer. Averell, based at Beverly, would draw the Confederates away from Lewisburg, while a mounted brigade under General Alfred N. Duffié, coming from Charleston, would occupy the abandoned town and help trap the Southern army. Averell's column of nearly 5,000 men left Beverly on 1 November; Duffié left Charleston on the 3rd.⁴

On 4 November Averell's men ran into part of Colonel William L. Jackson's command near Hillsboro. Jackson warned Echols and fought a series of delaying actions, falling back to the summit of Droop Mountain on the 5th. Echols marched his brigade through the night and arrived early on 6 November.⁵

Up the mountain

Averell planned to hold the Confederates' attention with a diversion on his left while sending his main attack along the top of the mountain on his right. His guns opened around 11 a.m. but did little damage. At 1:45 p.m. his right wing struck the Confederate left, and he ordered his remaining three regiments against the center. The Trust describes them charging up the mountain into deadly fire from above, then winning a brutal hand-to-hand fight at the Confederate line.⁶

Echols sent Colonel George S. Patton to the center, where he held up the Federal advance for a while. 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. Lowry writes that after nearly six hours of artillery fire, musketry and hand-to-hand combat, the Union infantry broke the Confederate left at a spot remembered as the Bloody Angle, and the retreat became a complete rout.⁷

Victory without the prize

By 4 p.m. it was over. Echols learned that Duffié was only 18 miles from lightly defended Lewisburg and, after a grueling night march, got his men away and fell back toward the Virginia border. The National Park Service estimates 415 casualties: 140 Union and 275 Confederate.⁸

The Federals took Lewisburg but went no further. 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. Lowry adds that within ten days the Confederates were back in their old positions.⁹

The end in West Virginia

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.¹⁰

One name on the Confederate side carried forward. Colonel George S. Patton, who bought time for the guns and wagons to escape, was killed at Third Winchester in 1864. His grandson and namesake, George S. Patton Jr., led American troops in North Africa, Sicily and Europe in the Second World War.¹¹

The field is now Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park, bought by the West Virginia Fish and Game Commission in April 1928 and dedicated on 4 July that year, as e-WV records. Its trails, laid out by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, lead past graves, breastworks and monuments.¹²