On April 20, 1863, Confederate Generals William E. "Grumble" Jones and John D. Imboden began a raid from Virginia through present-day West Virginia on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Taking separate routes, they later reported that they marched 1,100 miles, fought several engagements, captured 700 Federals, seized about 1,200 horses and 4,000 cattle, and burned 4 turnpike bridges, more than 20 railroad bridges, 2 trains, and 150,000 barrels of oil. Most bridges were soon repaired, Confederate losses were slight, and by May 26 both commands had returned to Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. On May 6, 1863, George Jackson Arnold crawled out from under his house in Weston after Confederate Generals William E. "Grumble" Jones and John D. Imboden had ridden into town two days earlier to rest their cavalrymen and horses during their raid through the newly formed state. Leaving Weston, the commanders separated to continue the raid, with Jones heading west toward Parkersburg while Imboden rode south to Sutton. Weston was important for its location at the junction of the Staunton and Parkersburg Turnpike and the Weston and Gauley Bridge Turnpike. The town endured two other Confederate raids besides the Jones-Imboden Raid, including one by General Albert G. Jenkins the previous summer, when his men looted stores, robbed the Exchange Bank, and took supplies intended for the first patients at the asylum across the river. George Jackson Arnold, who wrote the bill that created West Virginia, owned the house. After Virginia seceded from the Union in April 1861, he became a member of the General Assembly under the Restored Government of Virginia and, when requested, drew up the bill although he did not favor it. When it passed, he resigned his seat and returned to Weston. The county courthouse was completed in 1886 to replace the antebellum courthouse, which had burned. During the war, the earlier building was sometimes used as a Union hospital, and future president Rutherford B. Hayes, then a Union officer, wrote of visiting the sick there.