In the fall of 1864, Confederate raiders and bushwhackers angered Federal officers in the Shenandoah Valley. On September 22, Union soldiers captured Davy Getz near Woodstock wearing civilian clothes and carrying a squirrel rifle. When Union Gen. George A. Custer ordered his execution as a bushwhacker, town elders pleaded for leniency, saying that Getz had only the mind of a six-year-old, but Custer ignored them. On October 1 or 2, Getz was forced to dig his own grave in an orchard a hundred yards away and was shot to death. Adolph Heller of Woodstock, who had unsuccessfully tried to secure Getz's release, warned Custer, "You will sleep in a bloody grave for this." On October 3, Union Lt. John R. Meigs, son of U.S. Army Quartermaster Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs and a young officer on Gen. Philip H. Sheridan's staff, was killed in a brief fight with Confederate scouts north of Dayton. Believing that civilian bushwhackers had murdered Meigs, Sheridan ordered all houses within a three-mile radius of Dayton burned in retaliation. When soldiers of the 5th New York Cavalry came to burn a large two-story brick house, a 70-year-old woman, Abigail Lincoln Coffman, stood in the doorway and declared, "You cannot burn this house. I am a first cousin of the president." Her statement, and perhaps the discovery of her husband's Masonic apron by ransacking soldiers, saved her house while others nearby burned.