In the midst of the 1864 Valley Campaign, Woodstock witnessed the horrors of war as Confederate partisan rangers, guerrillas, and bushwhackers plagued the area, leading Union General Philip H. Sheridan by mid-August to order the execution of anyone captured wearing civilian clothes and carrying a weapon. While pursuing Jubal Early's retreating Confederate army from the Battle of Fisher's Hill, elements of Brigadier Gen. George A. Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade entered Woodstock on September 23 and captured 39-year-old Davy Getz, armed with a squirrel rifle, in the woods near town. A rope was tied around Getz's neck, and he was made to walk behind Custer's headquarters wagon as it moved south along the Valley Turnpike (U.S. Route 11). Several townsmen, including merchant Adolph Heller, followed and pleaded with Custer that Getz had the mind of a child and did not know what he was doing, but Custer refused to relent. Heller finally admonished Custer, saying, "You will have to sleep in a bloody grave for this." Getz was executed near Dayton in Rockingham County on October 2, 1864. Five days later, Federal troops reentered Woodstock and began laying waste as part of the infamous Burnings. A portion of Col. Thomas Devin's Brigade of the 1st U.S. Cavalry Division, the 19th New York Cavalry, destroyed the railroad depot, warehouses, a locomotive, and three boxcars on the siding. Steady winds then ignited fires in barns and haystacks on the outskirts of town, and although those particular properties were not intended targets, two Union regiments dismounted and helped extinguish the flames. That evening Sheridan wrote Gen. Ulysses Grant from Woodstock that the destruction of the Valley had reached from mountain to mountain in Augusta County to the south and would continue the next day to Strasburg in the north.