Bulltown sat on a hilltop above an important crossing of the Little Kanawha River, a chokepoint on the road between the Greenbrier Valley to the east and the Kanawha Valley to the west. In the autumn of 1863, that road was a Union communications artery. Whoever held Bulltown could cut it. The federal garrison there - about 400 men under Captain William Mattingly - was small but well-positioned, occupying a hilltop they had reinforced with felled logs and trenches dug into the clay. From the top of the hill they could see in every direction the country dropped away from them. The fort was makeshift but its sight lines were excellent.

William Lowther Jackson was a Confederate cavalryman, a former Virginia lieutenant governor, and a second cousin of Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson - a family connection that meant something on either side of the line. In late September 1863 he led a raiding party of 800 men out of the Greenbrier Valley with the Bulltown crossing as their objective. He intended to take the fort by surprise, splitting his force to converge from two directions at once and rushing the works in the darkness before dawn. The plan was sound. The execution was not. His men attacked at 4:30 a.m. on October 13 and quickly captured the Union pickets, but in the confusion of the night assault they failed to overwhelm the main garrison before Mattingly's troops could rouse themselves into the breastworks.

What followed was a long, indecisive day. The Confederates worked their way up the hillside and fired into the fort; the Union defenders fired back from behind their log barricades. Neither side could break through. Twice during the afternoon Jackson sent a flag of truce up to the works, demanding surrender, and twice the Union commander - by then Captain Simpson, Mattingly having been wounded in the thigh - refused, the second time with the famous answer about Hell and ice. The skirmish dragged on until about 4:30 p.m., almost twelve hours after it had begun. Then Jackson, his men exhausted and his element of surprise long gone, broke off the attack and withdrew toward the east. The Union held the fort and the road remained open.

The casualty figures are almost unbelievable for a twelve-hour engagement: no Union dead, only Mattingly seriously wounded and a few others scratched; the Confederates lost about eight killed and a similar number wounded. The most striking civilian casualty was Moses Cunningham, who owned the farm on which much of the fighting took place. At some point during the day, with his property being shot through from both directions, he ran out of his own house shouting 'Hurrah for Jeff Davis' - and was promptly wounded for his trouble. He survived. His outburst is one of the most quoted moments of the engagement, an unguarded glimpse of how torn the loyalties of central West Virginia ran, even as the new state was being assembled on the basis of Union sympathy.

Bulltown turned out to be more important in retrospect than it felt at the time. It was the last significant Confederate offensive in the new state of West Virginia, admitted to the Union four months earlier. After this, the Confederate war effort west of the Alleghenies dwindled into raids and partisan harassment; no more serious attempts were made to break Federal communications between the Greenbrier and the Kanawha. The Union earthworks Mattingly's men built that summer have survived. They were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984 and now sit within the protected zone around Burnsville Lake, an Army Corps of Engineers reservoir that impounds the Little Kanawha just downstream. Visitors can still walk the lines, trace the shallow trenches, and see the country exactly as Simpson saw it when he sent back his answer about Hell.