10/09/2026
From September 26 to October 8, 1864, after driving Gen. Jubal Early off Fisher’s Hill, Gen. Philip Sheridan turned his army on the Shenandoah Valley itself. Gen. Ulysses Grant had told him that if the war lasted another year, the Valley should remain a barren waste.
For thirteen days, cavalry and infantry burned barns, mills, and standing crops and drove off livestock across Augusta, Rockingham, Shenandoah, and Page counties, a belt some seventy miles long. Houses were ordered spared. The work ran from the Staunton and Harrisonburg country north toward Strasburg, on the Valley Pike and out the back roads.
The hardest stroke fell near Dayton. On October 3, Sheridan’s engineer, Lt. John R. Meigs, was killed by Confederate scouts. Sheridan, told the killers were bushwhackers, ordered the houses within several miles of the spot burned. About thirty homes north of Dayton went up, and the ground was long called the Burnt District. Dayton itself was spared after Lt. Col. Thomas Wildes of the 116th Ohio pleaded for the town.
Elsewhere the columns were thorough. On October 6 Custer’s division left Dayton and took the burning up the Back Road; other troopers worked the pike. From a hill near Mount Jackson, Union cavalrymen counted more than 160 barns burning at once.
On October 7 Sheridan reported to Grant that his men had destroyed over 2,000 barns filled with wheat, hay, and implements, and over 70 mills, had driven off more than 4,000 head of stock, and had killed and issued not less than 3,000 sheep. The fires died down as the army closed on Strasburg.
