During the Civil War, Buchanan was the largest community on the James River west of the Blue Ridge, with 110 households, 650 free inhabitants, and 250 slaves, and as the terminus of the James River and Kanawha Canal it served as an important Confederate depot for agricultural produce and pig iron bound for Richmond, while Wilson Warehouse and other warehouses stored military supplies and other goods headed for the Shenandoah Valley and western Virginia. On May 26, 1864, Union Gen. David Hunter marched south from Cedar Creek near Winchester as part of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s strategy of simultaneous attacks across Virginia, defeated Gen. William E. “Grumble” Jones at Piedmont on June 5, burned Virginia Military Institute at Lexington, and advanced toward Lynchburg, where Gen. Jubal A. Early repulsed him on June 17-18 and then turned north in July to threaten Washington. On June 14, 1864, after Hunter’s force forded the James River upstream from the Buchanan Bridge, which Confederate John C. McCausland had partially burned, Federal troops swarmed through Buchanan and the surrounding countryside, looted homes and farms for food and valuables, held a boisterous party fueled by a cache of fine wine, damaged canal locks and embankments, and destroyed several bateaux and packet boats and their cargoes. A resident later wrote that the lower part of town was left a ruin fit only for the habitation of owls and bats, and after Hunter’s raid Buchanan’s role as a commercial center dwindled until the railroad arrived in 1881. Across from Wilson Warehouse stood the home of novelist Mary Johnston, whose father, Maj. John W. Johnston, served in the Botetourt Artillery, and whose Civil War novels The Long Roll and Cease Firing drew on his diaries.