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, then north through central Maryland and across the Mason-Dixon Line into Pennsylvania, while Union Gen. George G. Meade, who replaced Gen. Joseph Hooker on June 28, led the Army of the Potomac in pursuit. The armies collided at Gettysburg on July 1 in a battle that neither general planned to fight there, and after three days the defeated Confederates retreated across the Potomac River into Virginia on July 14. Before that campaign reached Gettysburg, fighting on the afternoon of Sunday, June 21, 1863, around this intersection brought the Battle of Upperville to a bloody end, concluding five days of cavalry engagements along a twelve-mile corridor from Aldie to Upperville on the Ashby's Gap Turnpike. Along Trappe Road, North Carolina cavalrymen under Gen. Beverly Robertson took positions behind stone walls to cover the hurried westward retreat of the Southern cavalry toward the safety of Ashby's Gap atop the Blue Ridge. The 1st Maine Cavalry suddenly galloped in from the village to drive them out, but a volley from the North Carolinians stopped them short, and a confused hand-to-hand fight followed as the Maine men dismounted behind a stone wall north of the turnpike and fired into the Southern troops. At last, the 2nd New York and the 4th and 16th Pennsylvania Cavalry rode up and chased Robertson's men out of Upperville, ending the battle. In the final minutes, Col. Peter Evans of the 5th North Carolina ordered one last charge and spurred his horse toward Northerners swarming through the intersection, not having heard Robertson countermand the order; only a handful of his men followed before he fell mortally wounded. Years later, a Union officer, reflecting on the day, remarked, "Thus passes a Sunday in war."