Daniel Bowman Mill at Silver Lake

During the Civil War, the Daniel Bowman Mill stood at this site, grinding wheat brought by Rockingham County farmers in a prosperous agricultural region known as the breadbasket of the Confederacy. The Shenandoah Valley’s success in farming, reflected in the perfection of the reaper there and in Richmond’s great flourmills built to process Valley wheat harvests, made the region a vital source of support for the Confederacy. In the fall of 1864, Union Gen. Philip H. Sheridan persuaded Gen. Ulysses S. Grant that neutralizing the Valley was an important military expedient. Sheridan ordered his men to burn barns and mills that contained grain or forage while leaving empty ones alone and sparing those belonging to widows, single women, or orphans. Between September 26 and October 8, Union soldiers destroyed barns, mills, and field crops, slaughtered or drove away thousands of head of livestock, and leveled tanneries, woolen factories, sawmills, furnaces, and foundries. In Rockingham County, one of the ten most prosperous agricultural counties in America before the war, thirty-five mills were destroyed during this dark period, including the Daniel Bowman Mill.

Virginia · United States