During the American Civil War, control of the Shenandoah Valley was critical to Virginia and the Confederacy because its fertile fields, strategic position, and road network made it essential for moving armies and sustaining the war effort. The New Market-Luray area stood at the crossroads of the Valley's campaigns, with the Valley Turnpike enabling rapid movement and the New Market Gap providing the only path across the forty-five-mile Massanutten Mountain, which divided the main Valley from Luray Valley. In May 1862, Confederate Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson used this landscape in his Valley Campaign, turning east through the New Market Gap, moving north behind the screen of Massanutten, and surprising Union forces at Front Royal and Winchester, temporarily driving them from the Valley. On May 15, 1864, at the Battle of New Market, Confederate forces under Maj. Gen. John C. Breckinridge defeated a larger Union army under Maj. Gen. Franz Sigel, driving it from town and breaking its line after Breckinridge committed his entire force, including the Virginia Military Institute Cadet Battalion. The battle was one of the last major Confederate victories in the Valley and the only instance in American history in which a student body, the VMI Corps of Cadets, fought in a pitched battle. Later in 1864, the war turned decisively in the Valley as Gen. Philip Sheridan's Union army carried out a destructive two-week campaign known as The Burning, destroying mills, barns, factories, crops, and livestock to end the Valley's role as the Breadbasket of the Confederacy. By the end of 1864, the Union had established permanent control of the Shenandoah Valley, and the loss of the region foreshadowed Virginia's fall after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox.