The Battle At Droop Mountain

Nearly five months after West Virginia entered the Union, Brigadier General John Echols’s Confederate army still occupied the Greenbrier Valley and, from headquarters in Lewisburg, served as the foremost defense of the Virginia-Tennessee Railroad, an important Confederate supply line in southwest Virginia. After successfully repulsing Brigadier General William W. Averell’s Federal attack at White Sulphur Springs on August 26 and 27, 1863, Echols learned in early November that Averell had left Beverly and was again moving south toward the railroad. Confederate outposts in Pocahontas County tried to slow the advance, and Echols marched his army north through the night to Droop Mountain to reinforce them. His reinforcements arrived just in time, but although the outnumbered Confederates held the high ground through the morning and blocked the highway with artillery, Federal infantry overwhelmed Echols’s left flank in the afternoon. After his lines collapsed, Echols retreated south with the remnants of his command. Federal troops occupied Lewisburg on November 7, 1863, but burdened by prisoners and captured livestock, Averell returned to Beverly and waited until early December to launch a third and ultimately successful attack on the railroad. Operations in the Shenandoah Valley in the spring of 1864 then drew the remaining Confederate troops out of West Virginia, leaving the new state securely under Federal control for the rest of the war. With more than 400 casualties, including 140 Union and about 275 Confederate, the Battle at Droop Mountain was one of the last significant Civil War battles in West Virginia.

West Virginia · United States