The shallow trenches and log-and-earth breastworks on the hill above the Little Kanawha River crossing at Bulltown are still there. Faint to the casual visitor, plain to anyone who has been told where to look, they trace the perimeter of a Union strongpoint that on October 13, 1863, held against twelve hours of Confederate attack. The site is now an archaeological reserve administered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as part of the Bulltown Historic Area on the shore of Burnsville Lake. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984 and remains one of the best-preserved Civil War earthwork sites in West Virginia.
Civil War field fortifications were almost always meant to be temporary. Soldiers built them in a hurry, defended or attacked them in a single engagement, and abandoned them when the unit moved on. Most have been plowed under, built over, or simply weathered into oblivion. The Bulltown earthworks survived because of geography and bureaucracy: the hilltop was steep enough that no one bothered to farm it intensively, and when the Army Corps of Engineers acquired the surrounding land in the 1970s to create Burnsville Lake, the fort was inside the federal acquisition zone. Test excavations in that decade by Corps archaeologists confirmed the location of the perimeter walls, found post holes from structures inside, and recovered military artifacts dating to the 1863 battle and the months of garrison occupation around it.
The Union garrison stationed here in 1863 numbered about four hundred men under Captain William Mattingly. They occupied a hilltop above the Little Kanawha that gave them long sight lines in every direction. The fort itself was modest by the standards of the eastern theater - no stone walls, no permanent barracks, no formal artillery emplacements. What the troops built was a perimeter of felled logs and earth banked up to about chest height, with shallow trenches dug behind to give defenders cover. The shape of those works, traced today across the wooded hillside, gives a precise sense of what nineteenth-century soldiers thought they needed to defend against rifle fire and short-range assault. A nearby spring provided water; a stand of timber a quarter-mile downslope provided logs and firewood. The position was self-sufficient enough to function for months at a time.
The Corps of Engineers manages the fortification site as one component of a larger interpretive zone called the Bulltown Historic Area, on the south shore of Burnsville Lake. The area also includes a reconstructed mid-nineteenth-century village with a relocated farmhouse, a small log church, and a museum - all gathered to interpret the broader story of pre-war life in central West Virginia and the disruption of that life by the war. From the visitor center, marked trails lead up the hill to the earthworks. Walking the perimeter, a visitor can put their feet exactly where Union soldiers stood for twelve hours under fire on October 13, 1863, and trace the lines of approach that Confederate cavalry under William Lowther Jackson - cousin of Stonewall - tried to use to break through.
The 1984 National Register listing was prepared by archaeologist Robert F. Maslowski, whose nomination form documents what the test excavations revealed and argues for the site's significance as an unusually intact example of a small Union mountain garrison. The listing covers the archaeological footprint rather than any standing structures - no buildings from 1863 remain on the hilltop. What is being preserved is the hillside itself, the soil that contains the fort's archaeological record, and the position's relationship to the river crossing it was built to defend. Future excavations may add detail. For now, the most striking thing about the site is its quiet: a place where a long, loud day of nineteenth-century combat has been allowed to settle back into the silence of the woods, with markers and signage explaining what the trees have grown over.
Located at 38.79 N, 80.56 W on the south shore of Burnsville Lake in Braxton County, central West Virginia. Best viewed at 2,500-4,000 feet AGL; the wooded hilltop above the lake and the southern arm of impounded water make the position easy to locate. Burnsville Lake itself is the dominant visual landmark - look for the dam at the northern end and the long, narrow arms reaching south and east into wooded hollows. Nearest airports: Braxton County Airport (K48I) about 8 nm south at Sutton; Mid-Ohio Valley Regional (KPKB) about 50 nm northwest at Parkersburg.