In Quaker country around Goose Creek, just north of Mosby’s Confederacy, Confederate supporters aided Col. John S. Mosby’s Partisan Rangers with safe houses and supplies, and Mosby’s quartermaster often took from nearby Quaker farms to feed the command’s horses. In response to Mosby’s raids and attacks on Federal outposts and supply trains, Union Gen. Wesley Merritt led 5,000 cavalrymen from the Shenandoah Valley through Ashby’s Gap into the Loudoun Valley on November 28, 1864, under orders from Gen. Philip H. Sheridan to burn mills, barns, stables, corn cribs, farm machinery, and crops in Loudoun and Fauquier counties, and to carry off livestock and all men of military age. Merritt’s men swept through this area with torches on November 30 and December 1, and a local Quaker girl, Carrie Taylor, recalled smoke rising from neighbors’ barns, stockyards, and cornfields as everything was burned. The war cost the Goose Creek Friends dearly in barns, crops, livestock, and farm equipment, but after the war they worked together to restore their farm community to prosperity. The Goose Creek Friends, who had founded a thriving farm community here in the 1700s, were pacifists who opposed slavery, taught Black and white children together, may have sheltered travelers on the Underground Railroad, continued Quaker business on both sides of the Potomac River, and housed, fed, and cared for injured soldiers from both armies.