Jefferson: January 2009 Archives

View of the old Henry Myers mill located on Green Valley Road northeast of Jefferson, Pennsylvania. On the afternoon of June 30, 1863, Brig. Gen. Fitzhugh Lee's Confederate cavalry of Stuart's division rode past this once thriving mill en route to Hanover Junction (they would pause near John Epley Zeigler's house and his father's old tavern before changing course for New Salem).

Some of Lee's troopers paid a visit to the mill, but found it not to be the lucrative prize they had hoped. Nearby Cold Spring shopkeeper Conrad Myers reported losing 50 bushels of flour he had stored in the mill, but his losses pale compared to millers and farmers elsewhere in York County.

After leaving Jefferson Station in southern York County, Pennsylvania, the Hanover Branch Railroad's tracks headed northeasterly toward the Cold Spring Station. Very little remains of the roadbed in this stretch, because it has been heavily farmed over the past 145 years since Abraham Lincoln's train departed Jefferson Station for Hanover Junction and his return train to Baltimore and then Washington, D.C. However, there are a few vestiges remaining, including the piers of bridges burned on June 27, 1863, by Lt. Col. Elijah V. White's 35th Battalion, Virginia Cavalry during its mission to wreck the HBRR and the Hanover Junction rail yard.

Jefferson Station was located west of Jefferson, Pennsylvania, near the intersection of Krafts Mill Road and Jefferson Road (today's State Route 516). It was a railstop on the Hanover Branch Railroad serving the farmers of the Codorus region. The embankment in the right center marks the old track bed. Photo taken from the top of a hill along Jefferson Road / 516 looking to the southeast.

Click to enlarge the photos.

A Cannonball reader has asked me to do a series of posts on the Hanover Branch Railroad during the Gettysburg Campaign. In the first of these, we will look at the little known Confederate cavalry raid on Jefferson Station, an event not marked by any kind of commemorative historical wayside marker, unlike so many other incidents during "the Late Unpleasantness."

A view of the town square in Jefferson, Pennsylvania, (also known as Codorus Post Office during the Civil War) looking to the northwest down Berlin Street. The unusual iron Napoleon cannon tube was the subject of an earlier Cannonball entry. William T. Crist's dry goods store once occupied the large brick building during the Civil War. Rebel troopers paid a visit to this building during Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart's June 30, 1863, pause at Jefferson.

All photos taken by SLM on December 18, 2008.

Jefferson, a small village in southern York County, saw three different armed forces of cavalry pass through its town square during a single week in the Gettysburg Campaign. It was first visited on June 27, 1863, by Elijah V. White and the 250-man 35th Battalion, Virginia Cavalry, which had trotted into town from Hanover Junction to the northeast and then took the road in the upper right of this photo northwesterly toward Spring Forge (now Spring Grove).

On June 30, twenty times the number of Confederate cavalrymen would ride through the town square... and then on July 1, it would be Union cavalry that passed through Jefferson, this time to the welcome of the townspeople.