Union Church

The Battle of Cross Keys was fought on a Sunday, and when the battle began Confederate soldiers were inside Union Church, the house of worship that stood on the site of the present structure. A southern cavalry scout wrote that at the fire of the first gun at Cross Keys he galloped up to the little church, and as he dismounted and was about to enter the door, a shell came hissing over the church and burst a short way beyond, quickly dispersing the congregation. As the Federals advanced into the area and the Confederates pulled back, newspaper reporter Charles H. Webb arrived at the church near where the roads converge and twice came under cannon fire, first by the graveyard fence and then near the corner of the church, before moving up the road for safety. When he returned a half hour later, the building had been turned into a battlefield hospital, where some fifteen or twenty wounded had been brought in for the surgeons' attention. By the time the fighting ended that night, the church was packed with wounded, and Union Col. Albert Tracy recalled that the groaning and misery of the crowds brought in attested sadly to the destruction of limb and body. A visitor shortly after the war said the church's interior was a ruin and its walls showed many scars of heavy shot and shell. It was rebuilt after the war, and after a fire in 2003 major renovations were made to the building.

Virginia · United States