Nearly five months after West Virginia entered the Union, Brigadier General John Echols’s Confederate army still occupied the prosperous 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. The reinforcements arrived just in time, because Averell began his attack early. Throughout the morning, Echols’s outnumbered army held the high ground and blocked the highway with artillery, but in the afternoon Federal infantry crushed his left flank and overwhelmed his lines. Echols then retreated south with the remnants of his command. Federal troops occupied Lewisburg on November 7, 1863, but Averell, burdened by prisoners and captured livestock, returned to Beverly and waited until early December to launch a third attack on the railroad, which was ultimately successful. Operations in the Shenandoah Valley in the spring of 1864 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 was one of the last significant Civil War engagements in West Virginia.