After Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's victory over Union Gen. John Pope at the Second Battle of Manassas, Lee invaded the North, and after the Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac River on September 4, 1862, he detached Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's command to capture Harpers Ferry. On September 12-13, 1862, Maryland's first battle of the Civil War raged on Maryland Heights as Lee sought to eliminate the 14,000 Union soldiers at Harpers Ferry who threatened his line of supply and communication during his first invasion of the North. Jackson assigned Gen. Lafayette McLaws the task of seizing the mountain, and McLaws led 8,000 Confederates into Pleasant Valley to help surround and attack Harpers Ferry from the north. When McLaws encountered Union defenders on Friday, September 12, skirmishing began, and he sent Gen. Joseph B. Kershaw's South Carolina Brigade and Gen. William Barksdale's Mississippi Brigade up Elk Ridge at Solomon's Gap. After turning left and meeting stiff resistance until nightfall, the Confederates attacked again at dawn on Saturday, September 13, facing obstinate resistance and fierce fire from Federals behind log breastworks. After nine hours of fighting and more than 300 Union and Confederate casualties, the Federals withdrew into Harpers Ferry, and two days later they capitulated to Jackson in the largest surrender of U.S. troops during the war. In Pleasant Valley, the pacifist Anabaptist German religious sect nicknamed Dunkers had settled in the late 1700s and baptized generations in Israel Creek by submerging them three times in honor of the Trinity; although the battles of Maryland Heights and South Mountain disrupted their peaceful way of life, their church and farms were not wrecked like those of the Antietam Dunkers, and they still worship at the Brownsville Church of the Brethren, built in 1852.
