After Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's victory at Chancellorsville in May 1863, he led the Army of Northern Virginia west to the Shenandoah Valley, then north through central Maryland and into Pennsylvania, while Union Gen. George G. Meade, who replaced Gen. Joseph Hooker on June 28, pursued with the Army of the Potomac. Confederate cavalry commander Gen. J.E.B. Stuart cut Federal communications and rail lines and captured supplies before the armies collided at Gettysburg on July 1 and the defeated Confederates retreated into Virginia on July 14th. On June 19, 1863, two days after the fight at Aldie, cavalry clashed here on the Ashby's Gap Turnpike as Stuart screened Lee's march north from Union cavalry probes. Two Confederate artillery batteries were posted here and aimed east toward the Federals. After a morning artillery duel, Union Gen. David McMurtrie Gregg advanced two brigades across open fields, and they met determined resistance before reaching the woods on the ridge, where Stuart had deployed Gen. John R. Chambliss's brigade north of the turnpike and Gen. Beverly H. Robertson's brigade here and to the south. Mounted and dismounted Federals fought southward through the woods, driving the Confederates from tree to tree to this point, where fighting swirled around the blacksmith's shop. Stuart withdrew his artillery, and Chambliss formed a new line across the turnpike 500 yards away. That line held while the other Confederates retreated west to the high ground around Bittersweet Farm, and the Federals halted, exhausted by heat and fighting. Stuart again accomplished his goal of blocking the Union cavalry's westward probes. South of here during the Battle of Middleburg, Johann August Heinrich Heros von Brocke, a Prussion Army lieutenant who had come to America to fight for the Confederacy and served as a friend and aide-de-camp to Stuart, was shot in the neck and seriously wounded. He recuperated in Upperville, and Stuart wrote that he dragged along like a storm-battered mast, though his heart was unchanged. Von Borcke died in Prussia in 1895 of complications from his war wounds.