Saturday, Oct. 18, 1862, dawned clear and cold with a big frost.

The 13th and the 18th had a busy day of hard work ahead of them on a stretch of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad near Winchester.

Quartermaster clerk William H. Hill wrote in his diary that they were “loosening up the tracks and then burnt the cross ties and bent the rails.”

They were helping complete destruction begun back in the spring by the 2nd and 7th Virginia Cavalry regiments of a segment of the railroad which the Union had hoped to use to connect Washington, D.C., with the Shenandoah Valley.