The Third Battle of Winchester

Around 1777, prominent Virginian John Smith reportedly had the stately Hackwood House built by Hessian and British prisoners of war he was charged with guarding in Winchester during the Revolutionary War. During the Third Battle of Winchester, Gordon's Confederate troops formed around the house and its outbuildings. At 3 p.m., the Union Eighth, Sixth, and Nineteenth Corps attacked. Colonel Thoburn of the Eighth Corps recalled that a succession of stone walls gave excellent cover to the Confederates and that his men received very severe musketry fire before steadily advancing and driving them back. Afterward, James Franklin Fitts of the 12th Connecticut remembered Confederate dead lying thickly in the fields beyond, piled upon each other in the yard of the large stone mansion, with a ghastly row of gray-clad corpses along a wall and the fields and hillsides toward Winchester dotted with the fallen.

Virginia · United States