During the Battle of New Market on May 15, 1864, Confederate Gen. John C. Breckinridge's men heavily assaulted the left flank of Union Gen. Franz Sigel's army. Sigel counterattacked by sending Gen. Julius Stahel's cavalry charging down the Valley Turnpike, but the Confederates repulsed the attack and Stahel's men fell back in disorder, leaving Col. Jacob Campbell's 54th Pennsylvania Infantry to anchor the Union left. Sigel then ordered another infantry attack, with the 1st West Virginia Infantry advancing first to the right of the 54th Pennsylvania. Campbell ordered the 54th to charge as well, but under heavy fire the West Virginians retreated unexpectedly, leaving the 54th Pennsylvania alone as it came over the crest of a cedar-covered hill and encountered large numbers of Confederates waiting in a ravine near the woods. Heavy Confederate infantry fire tore into the unsupported Union ranks, and Campbell retreated to save his command. His men made two defensive stands in the cedar grove during the withdrawal. Of the regiment's 566 soldiers, 32 were killed, 100 wounded, and 42 captured, a loss of more than 30 percent of the unit, the second-highest regimental loss in the battle. The regiment named this part of the battlefield the Bloody Cedars. In October 1905, surviving veterans of the 54th Pennsylvania Infantry gathered there to dedicate a monument to their regiment's valor, one of the few statues in Virginia memorializing Pennsylvania's Civil War soldiers, and afterward took cedar saplings from Jacob Bushong's field, some of which still survive in a Johnstown, Pennsylvania, cemetery where many of the veterans are buried.