* * Phil Ross and the battle of Cloyd’s Mountain

Motorcycling buddy Phil Ross always gives me a run for my money, both in the skill with which he rides and his knowledge and love of Southwest Virginia and its history. Phil is originally from West Virginia and is formerly a highway historical markers program director with an extensive background in industrial archaeology. By day, he is a researcher at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, but on weekends he becomes a respected historian.

On a recent Sunday, a beautiful fall morning, he and I did a loop from Merrimac to Prices Fork, Belspring, Highland, Staffordsille, Eggleston, McCoy, Longshop, and home. We had stopped alongside the highway at Lilydell beside US-100 in north Pulaski County. “Right here on May 9, 1864,” Phil said, “the Union Army of Crook marched over the mountain from Giles County and encountered a firestorm from the Confederates.”

The raiding party, commanded by Brigadier General George Crook, had come from West Virginia in a coordinated attack. Their goal was to destroy the railroad tracks from Dublin to Radford (then called Central Depot), along with the bridge spanning the New River. Another division was headed for the iron and salt works further southwest in Saltville.

Phil explained that the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad had been built from Lynchburg to Bristol less than a decade earlier, and “It was state of the art! The grades were modest and the curves were slight, relative to other mountainous tracks. A train could move an entire army in a day what it would take a week to march. The track near Radford was a lifeline for the Confederacy, and both sides knew it of its strategic importance and vulnerability.”

On that fateful day almost 150 years ago, Crook’s brigades were met in the area where we parked our motorcycles, on the southern slope of Cloyd’s Mountain, an eastern extension of Little Walker Mountain, by Confederate Brigadier General Albert Jenkins, who had only assumed command the prior day.

With the low late-autumn sunshine in our faces, Phil waved his arm to the south across to a low bluff a quarter-mile away, towards the New River Valley Fairground. “Jenkins set up his artillery on that ridge and waited for Crook’s men to cross the mountain. He knew they were coming. The cannons would have been able to reach the Federals from the time they crested the ridge,” he turned behind and pointed to the north to the forested ridge top mountain. The whole scene looked tailor-made for killing lots of men.

There was an old farmhouse to our west. “That house was built before the war,” Phil continued. “The Cloyd family lived there and this was their farm, called ‘Back Creek Farm’. A hospital was set up there by the Union Army after the battle to treat all the wounded. The scene we’re looking at, other than with the addition of this four-lane road through it, would have looked very similar to the spring day of the battle.” Our day was had a crystalline peacefulness about it, but it was still easy to envision the tumult of that day. “The fighting was so intense that the woods caught fire!”

Phil told me all about the various regiments, replete with their number and home state, information that I quickly forgot. His memory for such things is impressive!

The advancing Yankees did a flanking maneuver to the east, catching the Confederates by surprise on their right flank. There were 6100 Union troops fighting 2400 Confederates, so eventually the battle turned in favor of the northerners. Although the troop numbers were small relative to more famous battles like Antietam and Gettysburg, the fighting was just as savage and brutal, lasting only a bit more than an hour. Casualties were staggering, with 688 losses and 538 losses, respectively, amounting to ten percent of the federal forces and 25 percent of the rebels. Two future presidents, Rutherford B. Hayes and William McKinley, were part of the frontal Union assault.

“I had family on both sides, including my great-great grandfather who marched with Crook,” Phil said wistfully. “If he hadn’t survived, I wouldn’t be here today. He was a huge guy for the time: six feet tall and 200 pounds. He was only sixteen.”

Phil explained that after the Confederate defeat, the Union forces continued to Dublin, “where they began destroying the tracks all the way to the river. They destroyed the horizontal structure of the bridge, but lacked the fire-power to destroy the fine stone bridge abutments in the river – which are still there! – allowing the Confederates to rebuild within a few weeks. Crook then marched into Blacksburg where his army camped on the grounds of the Olin and Preston Institute which would later become Virginia Tech. Then they marched over Salt Pond Mountain, past Mountain Lake, and back into West Virginia’s Monroe and Fayette County.”

Phil is doing research in conjunction with a re-enactment to be done next May. He has only been in Blacksburg for a few years, but he felt right at home from the beginning. “My family has been in the New River Valley since colonial times, and there are traces of my ancestors all around these hills. This place has always been comfortable for me.”