By Ryan Quint
When his pickets reported Federal troops up ahead in the small crossroads of Dranesville, Virginia, Brig. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart ordered the teamsters he was escorting to turn around and go back towards Centreville. Out on a foraging expedition with nearly 200 wagons, Stuart had been prepared to meet the enemy, but was not expecting it. The best defense, he reasoned, was to attack with his mixed brigade of infantry, 150 of his cavalry troopers and a four-gun battery.
Only 28, Stuart had already begun to establish his reputation for flamboyant style and bold tactics five months earlier with a daring charge against the Union 11th New York Zouaves in the Confederate victory at First Manassas. He shouted orders for his infantry to fan out into the woods on either side of the Centreville Road and advance towards the Union battle line along the Chain Bridge Road. Though there were fewer than 6,000 troops in total facing each other on December 20, 1861, both sides had something to prove. The Confederates were looking to rout the tenuous Union Army once again and the untested Pennsylvania Reserves wanted a chance to prove themselves in battle.
In 1818, Washington Drane built a hotel at the crossroads of the Leesburg and Georgetown Turnpikes at the western edge of Fairfax County. Halfway between the District of Columbia to the east and Leesburg to the west, travelers between the two could stay the night at Drane’s establishment for 12 cents and have breakfast for 25 cents. Seeing Drane’s success, others soon set up their own hotels and taverns along the route. Through the antebellum years, the small village might see as many as 50 large wagons stop over each night. The Virginia legislature honored Drane’s enterprising spirit in 1840 by christening the village Dranesville.
By the outbreak of the Civil War, Dranesville languished in the shadow of the railroad to the south through Herndon, which made the Washington to Leesburg trip much easier and faster. As the issue of slavery divided the country, Dranesville’s population had dwindled into the low hundreds, though an exact count doesn’t exist because the town wasn’t big enough to be its own census location.
Though small, Dranesville’s citizenry drew political lines in the sand, and neighbors soon became enemies. On May 23, 1861, as part of the popular referendum to endorse secession, Dranesville acted as one of Fairfax County’s polling locations. The local men voted 107 to 4 in favor of secession. One of those four, Howard Lasher, said that the secessionists told him “they would mark us.” Another later told Federal officials that pro-secessionist members of the town formed an ad hoc militia and rode about, threatening Unionists and their families.
This small war within a war continued even as the main armies formed and marched towards each other at Manassas. After that battle, rumors spread that the pro-secessionist militia took body parts of dead Union soldiers as trophies.
Just a few miles north of Dranesville, on a parcel of land called Lowe’s Island, the militia’s war of words turned to action in the middle of September 1861. Bounded to the north by the Potomac River and circumnavigated by parts of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, the island had become a popular place for Union soldiers camped across the river in Maryland to forage for food and supplies. Landowner McCarty Lowe, with no one else to turn to, asked the secessionist militia to help defend his property. A shootout on September 16 left one U.S. soldier dead, another wounded, and one captured. The militia delighted in rummaging through the dead man’s pockets and mockingly read his letters aloud in the center of town.
As the irregular warfare continued around Dranesville, some 10,000 Pennsylvanians crossed the Potomac River and set up their tents further to the east at a place christened Camp Pierpont nearly Langley, Virginia. Raised at the Keystone State’s expense, the Pennsylvania Reserve Volunteer Corps was then mustered into Federal service. Three brigades of infantry, one cavalry regiment, and four batteries of artillery answered to Maj. Gen. George McCall, a veteran of both the Seminole and Mexican Wars. Alongside McCall, the Reserves contained future luminaries such as George Meade and John Reynolds as brigade commanders.
The Pennsylvanians soon learned the outlying area through a series of marches and patrols, often to Dranesville. “We found a number of houses abandoned by their occupants who had fled on our approach under the impression we were Mamelukes and Bedouins coming to murder and destroy all we found,” one officer in the division wrote. He also noted “houses that had been abandoned for some time, their inhabitants having been driven away by their neighbors on account of their Union sentiments.” Soldiers sometimes traded words with Dranesville’s residents, but the troublesome secessionist militia seemed to disappear whenever the Pennsylvanians showed up in force. Aside from some desultory, long-range skirmishing, the Federals never came into contact with regular Confederate forces.
Three enslaved people escaped from Dranesville in late November and walked 11 miles to a Union camp. They told the story of the ambush at Lowe’s Island and, more importantly to Union officials, told the identities of those who had done the shooting. Those names were sent to Washington, D.C., and ultimately, to the desk of the army’s commander, George McClellan.
Incensed at what he perceived to be an unconscionable murder of his soldiers at the hands of irregulars who hid in the night, McClellan ordered a detachment to Dranesville to arrest the men. In a pre-dawn raid, the 1st Pennsylvania Cavalry apprehended nearly a dozen of Dranesville’s men, bringing them back in chains to the Old Capitol Prison.
The Pennsylvania Reserves went back to Dranesville at least twice more, bringing empty wagons to fill with forage for Camp Pierpont. As winter settled in, both sides knew they would need forage for their men and horses to last the cold. Dranesville’s location in no man’s land, made foraging expeditions lucrative for both armies.
Amidst this back and forth, a newly minted brigadier general arrived in the Pennsylvanians’ camp in late November. A Marylander by birth, Edward O. C. Ord’s career since his graduation from the Military Academy in 1839 had been mundane. By 1861, he was only a captain, a victim of the army’s glacial promotion system in the antebellum years. Posted in far-off Washington Territory when war broke out, Ord pulled some strings in the Adjutant General’s office for a general’s star and reassignment to Northern Virginia. At Camp Pierpont, Ord assumed command of the Pennsylvania Reserves’ Third Brigade.
Ord was a disciplinarian who demanded much of his command. One soldier wrote home after a review of the brigade that, “Last Sunday he inspected the regiments of the Third Brigade and ‘came down’ very hard on captains of companies whose men had the least bit of dust or tarnish on their muskets.” Another soldier noted that Ord “looks just like a Russian Marshal with his fierce Mustachios and beard.” But Ord also had a softer side. On a particularly cold night, one of Ord’s staff officers remembered the general “got up quietly, got a pair of blankets and covered me with them and tucked them around me as carefully as if I had been his child.”
On December 19, McCall ordered Ord to move to Dranesville the next morning on a twofold mission: First, he was to ensure the safety of Unionists in the Dranesville area persecuted by Confederate forces. Second, with about 40 wagons, his men were to gather badly needed forage and supplies near the town. To protect the wagons, Ord was to take his full brigade, plus an artillery battery and a regiment of cavalry. McCall also threw in the 1st Pennsylvania Rifles (informally known as the Bucktails) for some additional firepower. All told, Ord’s column would number close to 4,500 men. That evening, as other men in the division played football, Ord got his brigade together and issued commands: “This Brigade will march tomorrow morning at 6 O’clock a.m. armed and equipped with forty (40) rounds of ammunition and one day’s rations, cooked, canteens filled with coffee or tea, toward Drainesville.” However, it was not just the Federals who were preparing for a morning march to Dranesville.
For the past few months, J. E .B. Stuart had been in charge of the “Advance Outposts” of Confederate forces in Northern Virginia. Though only 28, his leadership during the near-constant skirmishing in the days after Manassas was noticed by his superiors. None of these skirmishes were large, but Stuart kept his cool and earned his brigadier general’s star in September. The action slowed as winter set in, but Stuart still champed at the bit to get at the Federals. Nominally in command of the army’s cavalry brigade, Stuart’s makeup of advanced outposts fluctuated frequently as units rotated in and out of service on the front line.
On December 19, Stuart rode towards Centreville to assemble an expedition that would march to Dranesville the next day and gather the forage that so far had only been going into U.S. wagons. His command of four infantry regiments, a battery of artillery, and about 150 cavalry troopers was drawn from various units already assigned to picket duty. The order to prepare came late in the day. As one soldier from the 6th South Carolina scribbled, “We have just got orders to be ready to march tomorrow morning at 5 o’clock with one day’s rations.” He presciently added, “I suppose as we report to Genl. Stewart [sic], the commander of the outposts, we are going out on a scout & may have a brush with the Yankees.” All in, Stuart would lead about 2,500 men to Dranesville.
Before the sun rose, Stuart’s column began its 16-mile march from Centreville to Dranesville Temperatures hovered near freezing, but the Confederates were in high spirits. One soldier remembered “it looked like a holiday or a frolic ahead.” As the wagons rolled over icy roads, they cracked and ripped the quiet morning, awakening “dogs that barked and howled by turns.”
The Pennsylvanians set out from Camp Pierpont a little later. The Federals were also in high spirits, with some riding in the empty forage wagons, singing loudly about hanging “Jeff Davis on a sour apple tree” until Ord hushed them.
As they neared Dranesville, Ord had his men begin picking up supplies. To guard the wagons, he ordered most of the 10th Pennsylvania Reserves to stay behind, taking only a few of the regiment’s companies into town.
Neither side was aware of the other as they approached Dranesville. Ord’s men followed the Leesburg & Georgetown Pike; Stuart approached via the Centreville Road to the south. The Pennsylvanians reached town first, and Ord instructed his men to fan out and secure the roads. The 1st Pennsylvania Rifles and the 9th Pennsylvania Reserves, each deployed a company of skirmishers in the thick woods south of town.
The two companies of Pennsylvanian skirmishers were catching their breaths when one spotted the Confederates in the distance. “There they come!” one shouted. Many of the Federals froze, entranced by their first sight of enemy troops. “We forgot that the Boys in Gray could also deploy as skirmishers until zip—zip! Zip! Zip! The rifle balls came in upon us from both flanks,” another admitted later. Members of the 9th Pennsylvania’s Company A, armed with Sharps Rifles, began to return fire while doggedly falling back to their main lines.
As the Federal sharpshooters fell back, Ord placed the rest of his brigade. On the outskirts of town, atop a plateau known to the locals as Drane’s Hill, Ord put the battery of Capt. Hezekiah Easton’s 1st Pennsylvania Light Artillery. The gunners jumped to their work and began to fire. Ord, who taught gunnery at Fort Monroe before the war, somewhat micromanaged the battery, shouting out orders to fire with shells. A staff officer remembered that with Ord’s Maryland accent, it sounded like “Load with shall.”
Ord sent Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Kane and the 1st Pennsylvania Rifles over to the Thornton House across the turnpike at the base of Drane’s Hill with orders to turn the two-story brick structure into an impromptu fort. Bucktails who couldn’t fit in the house lay down beside it as Confederate fire began to crack overhead. To the left of the Bucktails came what was left of the 10th Pennsylvania Reserves—the majority of the regiment had stayed behind with the wagons. The 6th and 9th Pennsylvania Reserves fell into line respectively to the right of the Thornton House. Ord put the 12th Pennsylvania Reserves and 1st Pennsylvania Cavalry on the backslope of Drane’s Hill in reserve.
On the other side, Stuart realized he had a problem on his hands. Having lost the race to Dranesville, he now had some 200 wagons dangerously close to enemy lines. He ordered the teamsters to turn around and head back towards Manassas. To give them time to do so, Stuart felt the best way to hold off the Federals was to attack them. Commanding a sizable force of combined arms for the first time in his young career, Stuart shouted orders for his infantry to fan out and advance towards the Union battle line.
Thick pine forests on both sides of the Centreville Road slowed Stuart’s movement and hampered communication between units. Stuart’s four guns from the Sumter Flying Artillery could not maneuver in the woods, so Capt. Allan Cutts was forced to deploy them in the road—an inviting target to Easton’s battery less than a mile away.
The results were quickly catastrophic as Easton’s artillerists dropped shells and solid shot around the Confederate gunners. “Our men began to fall rapidly,” a Confederate wrote. One of Cutts’s caissons exploded, killing some of the troops around it. A moment later, a solid shot swept in and beheaded two Confederate gunners. The visceral display of gore shocked onlookers, many of them experiencing combat for the first time. After the battle, the Confederates found the cannon “bespattered with the brains and blood of an artilleryman.” In just a matter of moments, the Confederate artillery had essentially been knocked out of action and would have no impact on the rest of the battle.
While Easton’s Pennsylvanians battered Cutts’ Georgians, the 11th Virginia Infantry, led by Col. Samuel Garland, moved obliquely to the right through the pines. Garland’s skirmishers had been the first Confederates to make contact with Ord’s men, but now these same soldiers wandered too far into the confusing pine trees. Trying to reconnect his regiment, Garland in turn extended to the right, creating a gap in Stuart’s line. Garland’s men came under fire from Pennsylvanians along the Leesburg & Alexandria Turnpike and from Kane’s riflemen in the Thornton House. Many of the Virginians hesitated to return fire because of their proximity to Easton’s battery. “They could have slaughtered every one of us with canister if we had shown ourselves,” one Virginian wrote. Another remembered that with enough Union soldiers to their front, “it seemed to me that the whole earth looked blue.”
While Garland’s 11th Virginia deployed to the right, the 10th Alabama, commanded by Col. John Forney, followed them. The Alabamians moved through the pines and came to a clearing around the homestead of Robert Coleman. Unlike their Virginian comrades who stopped and went to ground, the Alabamians charged ahead into the clearing, as Stuart wrote in his official report, “with a shout in a shower of bullets.”
A torrent of fire from hundreds of rifles and Easton’s guns swept through the 10th Alabama, devastating its command staff. Colonel Forney went down with a shattered arm. Lt. Col. James Martin, a well-respected judge back in Talladega County who had turned down a leave of absence to be present for the battle, was fatally shot through the chest. Capt. William Forney, brother of Colonel Forney and the commander of the 10th’s Company G, was shot in the calf. “The battle waxed warm and fierce, the missiles of death flew thick and fast and had no respect for persons with whom they came in contact,” a soldier in the 10th jotted in his diary.
As the 10th Alabama charged across their yard, the Coleman family hid in their basement where two cannonballs passed through. After the battle, they investigated the rest of the house and Ann Coleman later petitioned for a list of damages: “eleven cannon balls shot through the house and two shells exploded. House was badly damaged; the furniture almost destroyed.”
While the 10th Alabama and 11th Virginia struggled to the right of the Centreville Road, Stuart simultaneously ordered the 6th South Carolina Infantry to begin moving to the left. They were soon stymied by the thick pines and a heavy fire to their front. A soldier wrote to his father, “you couldn’t see 50 yards ahead of you.”
Problems quickly exacerbated as the 1st Kentucky Infantry came up behind the Carolinians. In the confusion of the pines, the Kentuckians thought the forces in front of them to be Federals. Major Thomas Woodward, from the 6th South Carolina, remembered looking behind him and “saw the Kentuckians in the kneeling position, with their rifles well levelled on us.” Before he could react, the Kentuckians let loose a volley that killed and wounded at least four. Some of the Carolinians shot back, continuing the friendly fire fiasco. Cooler heads soon prevailed, the 1st Kentucky moved to the left out from behind the Carolinians, and the Confederate line advanced.
With dogged tenacity the Carolinians pushed closer to the Thornton House, but the Federals never let up. Lt. John Bratton of the 6th South Carolina wrote to his wife, “The order was given to fall to the ground.” But it did not help the regiment very much as casualties continued to mount. Lieutenant Bratton crawled to his dying cousin but could do nothing as the 17-year old boy bled to death amongst the pines. Carrying the Confederate battle flag into combat for the first time in the war, the regiment’s color bearer received a nasty wound to the wrist, forcing him to relinquish the standard. Capt. Obadiah Harden took it up, but was mortally wounded, dying on New Year’s Day. Harden’s younger brother Thomas was also killed in the maelstrom.
Stuart’s Confederates did not have a monopoly on problems. The colonel of the 6th Pennsylvania Reserves had been forced to stay behind at Camp Pierpont due to illness. In his place, Lt. Colonel William Penrose led the regiment at Dranesville. Penrose, who had no military training, froze as the shooting began. One soldier wrote that Penrose “seemed to forget that he was an officer, and gave no commands whatever.” In that moment, the regiment’s adjutant, Henry McKean, stepped in and began to lead, solving what could have been a dire command crisis. General Ord, getting word of what was occurring, sent Lt. Col. Kane to command both the Bucktails and the 6th. Some other officers in the 6th Reserves got involved too—Lt. Benjamin Ashenfelter, for example, picked up a “musket and went to work with that,” he wrote his parents.
Further to the right, the 9th Pennsylvania Reserves came onto line. Their colonel, Conrad Jackson, had left his Quaker pacifist tenets behind to fight for the Union. But he likewise had no formal military training, and as the 1st Kentucky approached his line, Jackson’s first impression was that they were Union soldiers. Captain Robert Galway, one of Jackson’s company commanders, beseeched the colonel that the incoming soldiers were the enemy, but Jackson refused to give the order to open fire. The Kentuckians got the drop on the Pennsylvanians, opening fire and knocking men out of line, including Capt. Galway, who went down with a bullet in his leg. Both sides now began to exchange volleys “at pistol range,” one member of the 9th Reserves guessed. Another soldier of the regiment wrote home “the bullets came like hail stones over our heads.”
It had been nearly two hours since the opposing sides came into contact. Stuart, still giving orders in the midst of the Centreville Road, wrote home, “Men & horses fell around me like ten-pins.” Realizing that his wagons had safely retreated and he could make no more headway against the Federal line, Stuart issued orders for his men to start falling back.
Seeing the Confederates retreat, Ord demanded that his men pursue, but did not get very far. Exhausted from the day’s events and their adrenaline waning, their half-hearted counter-attack quickly lost steam. What momentum they did have quickly evaporated when they ran into a cavalry screen Stuart set up to cover his withdrawal. “The enemy came near enough to fire upon them once,” a cavalry officer wrote. The Battle of Dranesville was over.
The two-hour engagement cost Stuart 195 casualties, 65 of which were killed on the battlefield. Ord’s force suffered 73 losses, including 10 killed in action.
Confederate forces fell back a couple of miles to the Frying Pan Church where surgeons established a temporary field hospital there to care for the wounded.
Meanwhile, Ord’s men policed the battlefield and cared for their fallen. They gathered mementoes and collected discarded weapons. Teetering on exhaustion, the soldiers returned to Camp Pierpont where those who missed the battle interrogated their comrades and gawked at the souvenirs. “Everything of account had been taken such as revolvers & Southern money or script & officers trappings, swords, &c,” one veteran wrote.
The next morning Stuart returned with more troops, hoping to entice the Federals to a rematch and to gather his dead. Union soldiers did not take the bait. Stuart’s column returned to Centreville and began the sad duty of burying the corpses. One Confederate noted that the dead were piled into the wagons “like so many dead hogs.” Some of the dead were sent home, and an Alabama newspaper commented upon their arrival, “Christmas week has been a sad week in this part of the State.”
While funerals continued, the fallout of the battle began to take hold. Northern newspapers, hoping desperately for good news after a horrible 1861 in Virginia, latched onto the victory at Dranesville. “A splendid little affair,” crowed the New York Herald, while the New York Times lauded Dranesville and said it “gives great elation to all classes here.” Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, touched on the battle’s importance best when he commented that the battle “diffused an immense exhilaration throughout the Union ranks.” He continued, “It was a fitting and conclusive answer to every open assertion or whispered insinuation impeaching the courage or the steadiness of our raw Northern volunteers.”
Ord was feted as a hero. He earned a promotion to major general of volunteers, and the regiments under his command were given authorization to inscribe, in gold lettering, Dranesville, on their battle flags.
Meanwhile, Stuart felt the full brunt of the defeat. “Although our men are willing to ‘do or die,’ when called upon, I cannot see that any general should lose fifty or sixty men, simply from his own carelessness in not providing against a surprise,” one Tennessee newspaper printed. An Alabama newspaper piled on when its editors wrote that Stuart “has evidently risen to a post above his merit, and is but an additional instance of the unfortunate appointments that have come from the government at Richmond.” Officers who commanded the troops that Stuart had temporary control over at Dranesville were irate at the ways they perceived he threw them away needlessly. Gen. Cadmus Wilcox of Alabama complained to a friend that “By God sir Gen. S[tuart] has no wright [sic] to lead my people into Battle.”
The war moved on, and in time Stuart weathered the storm. He in turn became a hero of the Confederacy with his famed ride around the Army of the Potomac during the Peninsula Campaign. Other opportunities to command combined arms would come to him, perhaps most famously in 1863, when he took over for the wounded “Stonewall” Jackson at Chancellorsville. His death in May 1864 left many throughout the South heartbroken, his defeat at Dranesville long forgotten.
Ord commanded troops at the division, corps, and army level throughout the war. When Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Ord sat in the corner of the McLean House, having risen to lead the Army of the James. He died in 1883 and was buried with honors at Arlington National Cemetery.
The soldiers he commanded at Dranesville never forgot their success. “A proud lot of boys we were,” one veteran remembered. Every year the soldiers held a reunion to remember their service. These were men who fought on the Peninsula, and the grueling Seven Days; Second Manassas and Antietam’s bloody Cornfield; Fredericksburg and in the Valley of Death at Gettysburg; the confusion of the Wilderness and finally back home. They had stories to fill a thousand lifetimes. And yet every year, to mark their service, the hardy Pennsylvania Reserves convened on the anniversary of Dranesville, to remember their actions on Dec. 20, 1861.
Others who may have wanted to forget Dranesville could not. Robert Galway, the officer in the 9th Pennsylvania who exhorted his regiment’s commanding officer to open fire, was shot badly in the leg. To deal with the pain, he turned to morphine, but soon became addicted to the opiate. Galway died in 1864 from “disease of the brain.”
The armies marched through Dranesville throughout the war, campaigning into Maryland, back into Virginia, and once more into Pennsylvania. Townspeople accused of disloyalty and murdering Union soldiers in 1861 were released in 1862 due to a lack of evidence and went about their lives. No park commemorates one of the Union’s first battlefield victories of the war, and now instead the whole area sits under asphalt, an obscured byproduct of Northern Virginia’s urban sprawl.
But memories endure, and Draneville’s place as a small battle with a big impact remains. In the midst of the massive battles of the Civil War with tens of thousands of casualties, it can be easy to overlook the smaller actions like Dranesville. To the soldiers who fought and died there, however, Dranesville was just as cataclysmic as Antietam or Gettysburg. To remember them, each year, the congregation of the Dranesville Church of the Brethren gather atop Drane’s Hill. Candles sit atop a small table, flickering and their flames casting shadows on the wall. The congregation reads each name of a fallen soldier at Dranesville, and as they do, the candles are extinguished, one by one, until just darkness remains. In the pitch black, the true magnitude of Dranesville is truly, and viscerally, felt.
Ryan Quint, originally from Maine, has a degree in history from the University of Mary Washington and is a public historian who lives in Virginia. His first book, Determined to Stand and Fight: The Battle of Monocacy, was published as part of the Emerging Civil War Series. Quint’s most recent book, Dranesville: A Northern Virginia Town in the Crossfire of a Forgotten Battle, was published by Savas Beatie in 2024.
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