On October 19, 1863, about 12,000 Confederate and Union cavalry clashed at Buckland Mills in the last large-scale Confederate victory in Virginia. General J.E.B. Stuart, screening the Confederate infantry’s march to Culpeper County, blocked Union General H. Judson Kilpatrick’s advance at Buckland, then withdrew west along the Warrenton Turnpike. Union General George A. Custer occupied this ground while General Henry E. Davies’s brigade passed west in pursuit. Early in the afternoon, Confederate General Fitzhugh Lee’s division struck from the woods, pushed Custer back, and separated his brigade from Davies’s at New Baltimore, while Stuart drove Davies beyond Broad Run upstream. Lee then drove Custer east across the Broad Run bridge toward Gainesville, and by evening the Confederates again held this ground. The Confederates lost about 50 men and the Federals about 260, mostly prisoners, and they called the engagement the Buckland Races. Founded in 1797, Buckland had grown into a thriving community with two mills, a large distillery, several taverns, the Warrenton-Alexandria Turnpike, and a pest-resistant strain of wheat developed there, but during the war the turnpike bridge became a military objective and many local businesses closed. On August 27, 1862, during the Second Manassas campaign, Union General Robert Milroy’s brigade found the Broad Run bridge on fire and Confederate cavalry with one piece of artillery on the opposite side; Milroy’s cavalry detachment drove them off, and the bridge was quickly repaired so that parts of Union General John Pope’s army could cross to Manassas.
