Robert E. Lee was starving at Petersburg. His men needed the Richmond and Danville Railroad to stay alive. On June 25, 1864, five thousand Union cavalrymen under James Wilson and August Kautz rode hard to burn the crucial wooden bridge over the Staunton River. They expected an easy victory. Instead, they slammed into a network of raw earthworks built by a desperate skeleton crew. Captain Benjamin Farinholt had spent weeks prepping his defenses, throwing up fortifications on the south bank. He had under a thousand men. Actually, over half of his force consisted of local schoolboys and old farmers who had never fired at a human being. They stood their ground anyway. Pure grit.
The federal cavalry charged down the rail line four separate times. They had to cross open, sun-baked bottomland under a blistering hundred-degree heat. Confederate canister shot tore through their ranks, screaming across the Roanoke River flats. The fighting got bloody. Water ran out quickly, forcing wounded men to crawl toward the river under heavy fire. Farinholt even used a psychological trick, running an empty train back and forth over the tracks to make the Union commanders think reinforcements were pouring in. It worked. Wilson eventually gave up and retreated, leaving behind over 250 casualties. The local defenders lost just 34.
This battle saved Richmond's rail link for another nine months. Without those supplies, Lee's army would have collapsed during the summer of 1864 instead of holding out until the next spring. Today, the site contains some of the best-preserved Civil War earthworks in Virginia. You can still walk the trenches. You can see the exact angles where those young boys aimed their smoothbore muskets. It is not just a patch of grass. A forgotten victory that changed the timeline of the war, if only for a season.
What Makes Staunton River Bridge Fortification Special:
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