In August and September 1862, Confederate Gen. Albert G. Jenkins led 550 cavalrymen on a 500-mile raid that attacked Federal forces, captured prisoners, and destroyed military stores. Riding from Salt Sulphur Springs along the Tygart and Buckhannon Rivers, his men took 5,000 weapons in Buckhannon, occupied Weston, captured the Union garrison at Spencer on September 2, took Ripley and seized funds from the U.S. paymaster, then forded the Ohio River at Ravenswood and raised the Confederate flag in Ohio on September 4 before capturing Racine, recrossing the river, and ending the raid at Red House on the Kanawha River. Near the end of the raid, Jenkins considered attacking the Union garrison at Point Pleasant but declined because he lacked large cannons; instead, after driving in Federal pickets, he moved toward Buffalo, encamped nearby for the night, occupied the town the next morning on September 6, remained there until 1 o’clock that night, and then forded the Kanawha River, ending his first visit to Buffalo without bloodshed. He later camped on the Kanawha River near Buffalo. On September 26, Col. John A. Turley of the 91st Ohio Infantry led his regiment downriver from Point Pleasant and, four miles north of here, encountered Jenkins’s cavalry pickets. After crossing Eighteen Mile Creek, Turley formed his men on both sides of the road to Buffalo. Jenkins shelled the Federals from near the bridge at the lower end of town, but the rounds passed overhead. Hampered by a marshy ravine behind the Methodist church and Buffalo Academy, Turley nevertheless pushed Jenkins’s troopers through town, scattering the Confederates. Turley captured two men, killed or wounded about ten, and took several rifles and horses; he regretted not reaching town soon enough to capture Jenkins, who had slept in a private residence in Buffalo the previous night. Jenkins was transferred to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in December. Buffalo’s Methodist congregation, the first in the town, met in dwellings and log schoolhouses until building a frame church on High Street beside the Methodist cemetery in January 1833; flooding led to a move to higher ground near Buffalo Academy in 1848, Union troops occupied and burned that church near the war’s end, and the congregation later received restitution and built the present church in 1870.