After 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 into Pennsylvania, while George G. Meade, who replaced Joseph Hooker on June 28, led the Army of the Potomac in pursuit. The armies collided at Gettysburg on July 1, and after three days the defeated Confederates retreated across the Potomac into Virginia on July 14. At Gaines’s Crossroads, where Abraham Lincoln’s June 14 letter to Hooker imagined Lee’s army stretched thin, the Army of Northern Virginia did pass in slender columns during its march to Pennsylvania from June 11 to 20, with seventy thousand infantrymen, artillery, and supply wagons moving through the intersection past the Ben Venue mansion toward the Blue Ridge gaps and the Shenandoah Valley. Notable Confederate officers including Lee passed here. On June 11, Edward “Allegheny” Johnson’s division of Richard S. Ewell’s corps stopped while Ewell made his headquarters at Ben Venue. Jubal A. Early’s division bivouacked just west and marched by the next morning. George E. Pickett’s division of James Longstreet’s corps and W. Dorsey Pender’s division of A.P. Hill’s corps bivouacked here on June 16. After Gettysburg, Lee, Longstreet, and Hill passed through the crossroads marching south on July 23 and 24, many units again camped nearby, and on July 23 William C. Oates’s 15th Alabama Infantry cooled off in a branch of Battle Run nearby before skirmishing a mile east on the Warrenton Turnpike, present-day U.S. Route 211.
