Sunday, June 22, 2014

June 23, 1864---The Battle of The Weldon Railroad; Sparing the Greenbrier Hotel



JUNE 23, 1864:           
The Battle of The Weldon Railroad. After being repulsed the day before, Federal Generals Meade and Grant try again to cut the Weldon Railroad. Today, Blue troops of the famous First Vermont Brigade actually reach the railroad and begin tearing up track, but they are surprised by a Confederate force that falls upon them from their flank. Numerous Vermonters are killed and captured. Although Meade orders troops to move forward to assist the First Vermont, nothing is done until the pitched battle is nearly over. 
“Your delay has been fatal,” Meade castigated his subordinate, and later reported to Grant that, “on this particular occasion General Wright [the recalcitrant commander] showed himself totally unfit to command a corps.”  The First Vermont loses almost 3,000 men killed, wounded, and missing.  
As an aside, the First Vermont, which fought in the Peninsula Campaign, at Chancellorsville, and in the fore of the Overland Campaign, suffered the highest mortality count of any brigade in the history of the United States Army, with some 1,172 killed in action alone.
In his continuing retreat into West Virginia, General David Hunter U.S.A. tries to redeem himself by laying waste to the farms, crops and towns of the Shenandoah Valley by burning anything his men cannot carry off. Today he reaches Sweet Sulphur Springs and orders the town to be burned, including the Greenbrier Hotel. Since the troops have already crossed into West Virginia, his subordinates dissuade him from burning the place. 
Operating since 1778 as a famous resort and casino, The Greenbrier has played host to 26 U.S. Presidents, and was the site of a supersecret subterranean bunker that was meant to act as a radiation-proof capital city in the event of nuclear attack during the Cold War.

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