In the spring and summer of 1861, twenty-one men of Capt. William W. Mead's Loudoun Cavalry, Company K of the 6th Virginia Cavalry, were posted at this outpost near the lane to McKimmey's Landing and the Point of Rocks toll bridge over the Potomac River. On June 9, under orders from Col. Thomas J. Jackson, they partly burned the bridge and then watched Union troops on the Maryland side. On the evening of August 4, Loudoun County Unionist Samuel Means of Waterford guided sixty men of the 28th New York Infantry across the Potomac from Maryland below Berlin, present-day Brunswick. Reaching the Lovettsville Road, the Federals turned east toward the outpost. At dawn, Sgt. Boyd Barrett and Pvt. Cumberland George Orrison came out to feed their horses and saw the attack begin. As the Federals charged across the field, Barrett and Orrison ran for the cover of Furnace Mountain, but Orrison was killed and Barrett was wounded. Barrett and thirteen others escaped, while the Federals captured six men, twenty horses, and two civilians at the bridge tollhouse. The next day the New Yorkers burned the tollhouse and the remains of the bridge, and Orrison was buried at nearby New Valley Church, where a minister declared that every soldier who gave his life in the cause would go straight to heaven. Orrison was the first man killed in Loudoun County in the war. With crucial roadways, twelve fords, and four ferries across the Potomac River, Loudoun County became the highway of the armies during the war, and on July 4, 1864, Col. John S. Mosby's Partisan Rangers crossed here at McKimmey's Landing during Gen. Jubal A. Early's campaign on Washington, cutting telegraph wires and looting Point of Rocks in the action known as the Calico Raid.