On April 23, 1863, Confederate Gen. John D. Imboden and his 3,300 cavalrymen rested at Huttonsville in the Tygart Valley after marching from Bartow on the Staunton and Parkersburg Turnpike during a raid that he and Gen. William E. “Grumble” Jones had begun on April 20 from Virginia through present-day West Virginia against the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. En route to Huttonsville, Imboden’s men had waded the frigid, slush-filled Greenbrier River and crossed Cheat Mountain after deep snow had fallen the night before. There they prepared to attack Beverly, uncertain of the Federal strength there or whether the town had warning. Capt. Joseph French Harding, who had attended school at the Huttonsville Academy, led a scouting party to Beverly and, returning at dawn on April 24, encountered Randolph County sheriff Jesse Frank Phares riding north on the turnpike to warn the Federals. Harding fired after him and later wrote that although Phares was wounded, he stayed in the saddle until he reached the Federal pickets at the bridge about two miles away and gave them their first information of the Confederate advance. Harding reported 1,100 Federal soldiers in Beverly. Imboden had already ordered his troops forward on the twelve-mile march, dividing his command into two columns near the present site of Dailey and advancing down both sides of the Tygart River. Thick fog in the valley concealed their movements until 1 P.M., and by 5 P.M. the Federals had begun retreating from Beverly to Philippi. Huttonsville had earlier been the place where the 25th and 31st Virginia Infantry regiments were formed on June 14, 1861, as part of Confederate Gen. Robert S. Garnett’s Army of the Northwest. When Imboden wrote to Gen. Robert E. Lee in March 1863 about plans to invade northwestern Virginia, he asked for those regiments, and on April 9 Lee ordered them from eastern Virginia by railroad to Staunton to join the raid. In reports made after the larger expedition, Jones and Imboden said that on their separate routes they marched 1,100 miles, fought several engagements, captured 100 Federals, seized about 1,200 horses and 4,000 cattle, and burned 4 turnpike bridges, more than 20 railroad bridges, 2 trains, and 150,000 barrels of oil; most bridges were soon repaired, Confederate losses were slight, and by May 26 both commands had returned to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.