This nearly three-hundred-year-old farm was the site of the First and Second Battles of Kernstown, the opening scenes of the Second Battle of Winchester, and several smaller engagements. The Hoge family of Scotland settled here in 1735, and only four families—the Hoge, Pritchard, Burton, and Grim families—farmed the land before the Kernstown Battlefield Association acquired it in 2000. In 1854, Samuel R. Pritchard completed the brick Greek Revival-style house on the small rise a 1/4 mile past the gate. The Pritchard family, including several small children, remained in the house during each battle as fighting raged just outside, and after each battle it became a hospital for the wounded. The First Battle of Kernstown on March 23, 1862, was the first major battle in the Shenandoah Valley and in Confederate Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's Valley Campaign; it was his only defeat as an independent commander but was considered a strategic victory because it tied up a large Union army at the lower northern end of the Valley. The Second Battle of Kernstown on July 24, 1864, was the last major Confederate victory in the Valley, as Gen. Jubal A. Early defeated the forces of Gen. George Crook and Col. James Mulligan, but that victory hardened Federal determination to end Confederate control of the Valley later that year. Among the combatants at Second Kernstown were two future U.S. presidents, Union Col. Rutherford B. Hayes and Lt. William McKinley, and former U.S. vice president Confederate Gen. John C. Breckinridge.
