Chambersburg, Pa., felt the hard hand of war when a Confederate raiding party put the town to the torch in the summer of 1864.
The citizens of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, upon hearing the court house bell tolling on July 30, 1864, knew that something out of the ordinary was happening in Franklin County. Confederate cavalrymen and horse artillery under the command of Brigadier General John McCausland had appeared on the western horizon at dawn and fired off several shells. As a result, Union Major General Darius Couch and his Department of the Susquehanna staff decided to leave the town before it was occupied by the Rebels.
The townsfolk followed the bell’s summons to the town square, known as the Diamond, to hear a proclamation ordered by McCausland. Rebel troops had rampaged through Chambersburg several times before, but this time the tocsin was sounding for a critical confrontation between Rebel cavalry and the town leaders.
At the war’s outset, Chambersburg had been a prosperous community of some 5,000 people, a county seat that served as a commercial hub for surrounding farmland. Shops, bars, hotels and banks lined its streets. Trains from two railroads regularly chugged through its station.
The town had built up in almost the dead center of the lush Cumberland Valley, part of the Great Valley that ran from Pennsylvania to Georgia. In peacetime its location had been a boon; in wartime it was a curse. Rebels used the Great Valley, known in Virginia as the Shenandoah, as an avenue of northern invasion. In 1862 and during the Gettysburg Campaign, the Army of Northern Virginia took its share of plunder from Chambersburg.
By 1864, the same year that Yankees razed many buildings in the Shenandoah, McCausland wanted more. He wanted money. Rebels had successfully ransomed several Maryland towns earlier that summer, and now McCausland demanded $500,000 in cash or $100,000 in gold. When town leaders told him that was impossible, McCausland responded with an ultimatum: Pay him or he’d burn the town. But no money was forthcoming.
Couch had evacuated partly in hopes that the Confederates would treat Chambersburg as an open city. That hope literally went up in smoke when squads of troopers with firebrands ranged through the town center, putting many of the buildings to the torch. Around noon, when McCausland’s men moved out, they left Chambersburg in flames.
Amazingly, no civilians were killed or injured in the confrontation. But the townspeople were left to watch their prosperity fall to ashes. Nearly 600 residents would later file damage claims resulting from the raid, with total damage estimated at $3 million—a huge amount in 1860s money.
On August 31, 1864, the local news paper Valley Spirit ran an epitaph for the shattered county seat: “Everything has changed since the burning. Business is all conducted in little shops and shanties on the back streets…. Many of our citizens have removed to other places never to return.” And the paper went on to warn, “Our people will only realize what they have lost, and what hard times are, when cruel winter comes.”
Originally published in the June 2009 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here.
