After the Philippi Races on June 3, 1861, Confederate forces retreated from this area, and at Huttonsville, 26 miles south, Confederate General Robert S. Garnett took command of the Army of the Northwest with the goal of reclaiming Western Virginia. Garnett identified two mountain passes as gates to the northwestern country, one at Rich Mountain and the other here at Laurel Hill on the Beverly-Fairmont Turnpike. Leaving 1,300 men at the stronger post at Rich Mountain, he began fortifying Camp Laurel Hill on June 16, 1861, with the remainder of his 5,300 Confederates, creating heavy entrenchments around the camp. By early July, Federal troops threatened as Maj. General George McClellan led three brigades toward Rich Mountain while a brigade under Union General Thomas A. Morris marched to Laurel Hill. Here Garnett's Confederates skirmished with a nearly equal enemy force, and from July 7-11, 1861, gunfire echoed from the ridges as soldiers in blue and gray received their baptism of fire. On the evening of July 11, after learning that the Confederates had been defeated at Rich Mountain and fearing that the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike, his vital supply line to the Shenandoah Valley, had been severed, Garnett abandoned Laurel Hill near midnight and led his army east in an attempt to escape. On July 13 at Corricks Ford in Tucker County, pursuing Federals captured most of the Confederate supply wagons and killed Garnett, and demoralized Confederates fled across the mountains to Monterey, Virginia. The events here in 1861 made George McClellan a national hero, solidified Union control of Western Virginia, helped spur Unionists in Wheeling to form the Restored Government of Virginia, and by 1863 contributed to the birth of West Virginia.