After Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's victory at Chancellorsville in May 1863, he led the Army of Northern Virginia west to the Shenandoah Valley and then north through Maryland into Pennsylvania, while Union Gen. George G. Meade, who replaced Gen. Joseph Hooker on June 26, led the Army of the Potomac in pursuit until the armies collided at Gettysburg on July 1 and the defeated Confederates recrossed the Potomac into Virginia on July 14. In 1863, the Ashby's Gap Turnpike bisected Rector's Crossroads, now Atoka, and the hamlet became a center of activity as Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart screened Lee's movement north in the Shenandoah Valley from Federal forces. On the morning of June 21, fighting began two ridgelines east of Rector's Crossroads, where Union cavalry and Col. Strong Vincent's infantry brigade drove Stuart westward from the first ridge and then the second. Stuart then established a third position west of Goose Creek Bridge and left a rear guard of 200 troopers under Capt. Angus P. Brown of the 1st South Carolina Cavalry to delay the Federals while the rest of his command crossed the narrow bridge. Brown's men skirmished briefly near the crossroads before falling back to high ground, and although Brown and several of his men were wounded, they held off the Federals until ordered to retire, allowing Stuart to form a strong position across the bridge. On June 24, Stuart returned and met Maj. John Singleton Mosby there to discuss Stuart's route across the Potomac at the start of the ride to Gettysburg that later became much debated. In the stone house there on June 10, 1863, Mosby first wrote orders for his 43rd Battalion, Partisan Rangers, while his men waited nearby, and years after the war he returned to the parlor and was moved to tears.