Winfield sits on the Kanawha River where it loops toward the Ohio, and whoever controlled that stretch of riverfront controlled steamboat traffic on the upper Kanawha. By late 1864, the Kanawha Valley had been a contested corridor for three years. Union forces held it, but Confederate cavalry kept probing for weak spots. The Putnam County Courthouse stood in Winfield. The town was the county seat. Taking Winfield would have meant taking a courthouse, a river crossing, and a symbolic prize all at once. Lieutenant Colonel Vincent Witcher of the 34th Virginia Cavalry Battalion led one column. Captain Phillip Thurmond led the other, riding at the head of Thurmond's Rangers, his own irregular company attached to the 44th Virginia Cavalry.

The 425 Confederate troopers approached Winfield under cover of darkness, expecting to surprise a sleeping town. Somewhere on the approach they learned what they had not known when they started: a Union garrison was waiting. Company D of the 7th West Virginia Cavalry, commanded by Captain John Reynolds, had been posted to Winfield primarily to protect steamboat traffic. Their secondary mission was to keep the courthouse and the town safe from Confederate raids. Reynolds had perhaps 100 men. The Confederates had over four times that number. The numbers should have decided it.

What numbers did not capture was who Reynolds's men were. Company D had been recruited from Putnam County and the counties around it. These troopers had grown up along these riverbanks, knew the streets of Winfield, knew the houses behind the courthouse, knew which neighbors had stayed Union and which had gone south. They were not foreign occupiers waking up to an attack. They were men in defensive positions on familiar ground, fighting people they knew were coming to burn their courthouse. The Confederate columns hit the Union line, and the line held. Captain Phillip Thurmond was killed in the fighting. Several of his men were taken prisoner. Reynolds reported no significant casualties among his own troopers.

The Battle of Winfield was small by Civil War standards - fewer than a thousand total men engaged, no army wing maneuvering, no famous officers commanding. But it was decisive for the people who lived there. The courthouse stood. Steamboat traffic continued. Putnam County remained in Union hands for the last six months of the war. Captain Thurmond's body was reportedly buried locally; his rangers were absorbed into other Confederate units after his death. Today a historical marker stands in Winfield commemorating the engagement. The town has grown around the place where the battle was fought, mostly forgetting it, the way most towns forget the small Civil War skirmishes that happened on their doorsteps - until you remember that for the men of Company D, on that October night, the war was not happening somewhere else. It was happening at home.