In 1861, Union and Confederate forces competed for control of Western Virginia. By July, Union Gen. Jacob D. Cox had driven Confederate Gen. Henry A Wise’s army out of the Kanawha Valley and was advancing east on the James River and Kanawha Turnpike from Gauley Bridge to occupy more of the region. Knowing that Confederate Gen. John B. Floyd’s force was also advancing and might flank his army, Cox sent Col. Erastus B. Tyler’s 7th Ohio Infantry to Kesslers Cross Lanes to block that movement. Many of Tyler’s men, recruited from Oberlin College in Ohio, were nicknamed the Praying Company for their continual reading of the Bible. Cox camped on a small hill near Zoar Baptist Church on the evening of August 25, while Tyler held the intersection, but Tyler apparently failed to post enough guards to warn of attack. At 5 A.M. the next morning, as the young soldiers ate breakfast, Floyd and 1,700 men approached, surprised the Federals, and routed them. The Federals reported 15 killed, 20 wounded, and 38 captured, while the rest fled toward the Kanawha Valley. Rather than pursue them, Floyd withdrew to a fortified camp on the Patterson Farm on a hill above Carnifex Ferry on the Gauley River. Wise later mocked Floyd by calling it the “battle of knives and forks at Cross Lanes” and saying the action had so elated him that he thought himself capable of accomplishing impossibilities, yet he was soon unable to hold the ferry crossing.