During the Battle of Hoover's Gap, General A. P. Stewart's Division of the 2nd Army Corps in the Army of Tennessee marched double-quick five miles from its camp at Fairfield through rain on the afternoon of Friday, June 24, 1863, and made three frontal assaults against entrenched Union forces of John Wilder's Mounted Infantry and Eli Lilly's 18th Indiana Artillery. Confederate troops there faced the new 7-shot Spencers for the first time in the war, in the hands of Wilder's two thousand mounted infantry, while Lilly's six 3-inch rifles and four mountain howitzers added to the defense. Rifle fire and 350 double-shot canister rounds barely prevented the Confederate forces from overrunning the Union positions, and darkness ended the fighting.