Day 2 saw us waking up in Harrisonburg. Our itinerary for the day: New Market, Fisher's Hill, and Cedar Creek, all of which have actual preserved battlefields to visit (unlike for the Battle of Piedmont). The 14th Pennsylvania (or detachments thereof) took place in all three battles.
New Market
As Civil War battles go, the Battle of New Market was a relatively small affair. About 10,000 troops took part in the battle, with about 1,400 casualties. Compare that to 50,000 casualties at Gettysburg.
But that doesn't mean the battle wasn't important in its own way. The Shenandoah was the breadbasket of the Confederacy and provided the lifeblood for General Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, which was just on the other side of the Blue Ridge fighting it out with
General Grant. Grant wanted to disrupt the resources that Lee was funneling to his army from the Valley, and to force Lee to move some of his troops to the Valley to deal with the threat. Franz Sigel was in overall command in the Valley when the armies clashed at New Market on May 15, 1864. Spoiler alert: it didn't end well for Sigel, who ended up retreating back into Maryland and being replaced by David Hunter (he was in command during the Battle if Piedmont, the site we'd visited the day before).
Like the other battlefields we visited, the New Market battlefield was right along I-81 and Route 11 (the old Valley Turnpike). In this part of the world, getting off the highway plops you pretty quickly into the middle of fields and narrow, two-lane roads. Hopping off the highway, we crossed back under highway, turned right immediately, and were at the battlefield.
According to the Civil War Trust, 20 acres have been preserved here (it feels like more, since the encroachment of suburbia is modest, and even beyond the preserved land there isn't much but fields and barns to impede the view). But also there at the battlefield is the Virginia Museum of the Civil War. The museum has some nifty artifacts--my dad was interested in some of
the rifles and early machine guns on display; I liked the uniforms--and the helpful dioramas and tableaux. We were also directed to a video presented in a little theater (on something of a continuous loop). It told the story of the Virginia Military Academy (VMI) cadets who fought at the Battle of New Market, ten of whom died. There was such a focus on these young men that I started to wonder whether anyone else took part in the battle. I guess it's one of the most attention-grabbing stories of the battle: a whole corp of boys from VMI come marching up to New Market to defend Virginia, and they fight (and die) bravely. Plus . . . well, this is Virginia, so there's a natural tendency to focus on the Virginia boys, above and beyond the Southern habit of subtly (or not-so-subtly) romanticizing the Confederates.
After we'd had a good long look around the museum, Dad and I headed outside and
hopped on our bikes. It was a lovely morning as we cruised across the grass towards the old Bushong Farm, a white woodframe building with a clutch of outbuildings around it. We paused to read the signs telling us that the Confederates were arrayed roughly in a line from our left to our right, the Yankees in front of us in an opposing line. We took a bit of a walk to the canons set out on the open ground, while meanwhile a farmer was baling hay nearby. The smell of cut grass warmed in by a thick yellow sunlight mingled with the buzz of insects and the faint hum of a highway that seemed a million miles away. To the east was the all-too-evident Massanuten mountain and the gap through it: New Market Gap. It was a pretty spectacular view.
But James was not in the infantry, and this was the infantry's part of the battle. So, after taking a look around a wheelwright's and smith's shop (James was a blacksmith), we hopped on our bikes and rode through a tunnel under I-81 to the strip of land between the highway and Route 11. We rumbled down some rough terrain and back up a low hill (I came to a grinding halt thanks to my lack of leg muscles and a persnickety bike). We came to a monument to the 54th Pennsylvania Cavalry. It's a pretty standard Civil War memorial, with a pedestal bearing the unit's name and a soldier with gun in hand standing on the pedestal. It was there, along the Valley Pike, that the 14th PA, under Stahel, came sweeping down the Pike from the north . . . and

But they were there. Right there. In that spot, where there's a body shop now. But so many other things are just as they were: the mountains, the fields . . .
Having ridden all over the battlefield (well, over some of it), we rode back to our vehicles, packed up our bikes, and went into town for lunch at The Southern Kitchen. It was delicious, by the way: we got some fantastic fried chicken.
Fisher's Hill
If the battle of New Market was "minor", the Battle of Fisher's Hill was more so, in some ways. The battle took place just two days after the Third Battle of Winchester (which I will talk about in another blog post). The Confederates had been defeated there and retreated to Fisher's Hill, which is actually a series of hills that stretches across the Valley not far from Winchester. The Confederates thought to take a stand here. They considered it an impregnable stronghold. But they were flanked and routed, and sent scurrying south again.
I say this because it was a pleasant, if damp, walk, up the hill, but after tramping through the grass for about a mile, we stopped, because we weren't sure what lay ahead of us (there might have been wonderful things, but it also might have been two more miles of wet grass), and as we walked back we took a left instead of a right and ended up at a dead end. We had to backtrack. Better signage would have been appreciated!

To the west, on Back Road, was where the 14th PA Cavalry saw action. My handy-dandy battle map showed me that the 14th was slightly north of the rest of the Union line. Like in previous places we visited, they swept down the rode during the battle, from north to south, on the right flank of the Union Army. It was on this side of the battlefield that the infantry came swooping down on the Confederate flank--so even if the cavalry hung back for that, they certainly would have witnessed it.
Cedar Creek
The Confederates were beaten at Fisher's Hill, but it wasn't the end of them by any means. A month later, in October, the Confederates regrouped and moved north. There was a battle at Cedar Creek, very near Winchester. Here at Cedar Creek, it looked like the numerically inferior Confederates might send the Federals flying back to Maryland (or further) again, but just as things got hairy, General Philip Sheridan, who had commanded at Third Winchester and Fisher's Hill, came racing back from Washington, where he'd been conferring with General Grant. He arrived in the nick of time, rallying his troops and winning the battle. It was a death knell for the depleted Confederate forces, which couldn't afford the casualties. This was basically the end of the Confederates in the Valley. That meant that Washington DC was no longer in danger from Confederate forces using the Shenandoah as a "back door", and that Lee would have a lot resources on hand while he was besieged in Petersburg.

And so our adventure on Day 2 came to an end. We drove the short distance to our hotel in Winchester, had dinner in a restaurant across the block, showered, and went to bed.
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