Qualla: Bolivar Heights Battlefield

Bolivar Heights Battlefield: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Crazy Horse 1876, CC BY-SA 3.0. On September 15, 1862, Colonel Dixon Miles raised a white flag over Bolivar Heights and surrendered 12,419 Union soldiers to Stonewall Jackson. It was the largest mass surrender of United States troops the country had ever seen, and it would remain so for eighty years - until Bataan in 1942. Miles never lived to see how badly he had been beaten. A Confederate shell killed him before the formal surrender was complete. The plateau where it all happened sits 669 feet above sea level, lower than the two other heights that flank Harpers Ferry, and that was its problem: it was the easiest one to come at, and the hardest to defend if you lost the others. Five times during the Civil War, armies fought over this ridge. Today the trenches the Union dug here are still visible in the grass, and the cannons still point west, as if expecting Jackson to come back through the gap one more time.

Image: Crazy Horse 1876 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bolivar Heights Battlefield: The Three Heights

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mark Fickett, CC BY 3.0. Harpers Ferry sits in a bowl carved by two rivers. The Potomac flows south past Maryland Heights, the Shenandoah flows north past Loudoun Heights, and the town itself huddles where they meet. To the west, blocking the only landward approach, rises Bolivar Heights - a long, easy p...

Image: Mark Fickett | CC BY 3.0

Bolivar Heights Battlefield: Miles' Mistake

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vpuliva, Public domain. When Lee crossed into Maryland in September 1862, the United States garrison at Harpers Ferry stood under the command of Colonel Dixon S. Miles. His orders were to hold the town and defend all places to the last extremity. Miles read the first instruction and apparently forgot th...

Image: Vpuliva | Public domain

Bolivar Heights Battlefield: Earthworks and a Balloon

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HarpersFerryNPS, CC BY 2.0. After Antietam the Federals returned to Bolivar Heights determined not to repeat Miles' mistake. The entire 2nd Corps of the Army of the Potomac - nearly 15,000 men - bivouacked here for six weeks in the fall of 1862. They dug trenches the length of the ridge and built earthworks...

Image: HarpersFerryNPS | CC BY 2.0

Bolivar Heights Battlefield: Wagons, Mules, and Graves

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Acroterion, CC BY-SA 4.0. By 1864 the strategic value of Bolivar Heights had shifted from battlefield to logistics depot. During Philip Sheridan's Shenandoah Valley Campaign that autumn, the easy slopes became the largest Union corral and wagon yard in the valley - thousands of mules, hundreds of quarterm...

Image: Acroterion | CC BY-SA 4.0