Raiders in Buffalo

Raiders in Buffalo. Clashing with Jenkins. Confederate Gen. Albert G. Jenkins led 550 cavalrymen on a 500-mile raid, Aug. 22 to Sept. 12, 1862, attacking Federal forces, capturing prisoners, and destroying military stores. From Salt Sulphur Springs he rode along the Tygart and Buckhannon Rivers, taking 5,000 weapons in Buckhannon and occupying Weston. He captured the Union garrison at Spencer on Sept. 2 and then took Ripley, where he seized funds from the U.S. paymaster. At Ravenswood, he forded the Ohio River and raised the Confederate flag in Ohio on Sept. 4. He captured Racine, recrossed the river, and ended the raid at Red House on the Kanawha River. , Near the end of Confederate Gen. Albert G. Jenkins’s raid, he considered attacking the Union garrison at Point Pleasant but decided against it because he lacked large cannons. Instead, after driving in the Federal pickets, Jenkins recalled he “then proceeded with my main body towards Buffalo, a small town situated on the Kanawha 20 miles above its mouth. On arriving near it we encamped for the night and occupied it next morning [September 6], and remaining there until 1 o’clock that night crossed the Kanawha River by fording.” Jenkins’s first visit to Buffalo ended with no bloodshed. , Jenkins subsequently camped on the Kanawha River in the vicinity of Buffalo. On September 26, Col. John A. Turley, 91st Ohio Infantry, led his regiment downriver from Point Pleasant. Four miles north of here (a mile north of Eighteen Mile Creek) he encountered Jenkins’s cavalry pickets. After crossing the creek, Turley deployed his men in battle line on both sides of the road to Buffalo. Jenkins shelled the Federals from “near the bridge, at the lower end of the town,” but the rounds passed overhead. Turley, impeded by the “marshy ravine” behind the Methodist church and Buffalo Academy, pushed Jenkins’s troopers through the town. The Confederates scattered. Turley captured two, killed or wounded about ten, and took several rifles and horses. Turley regretted not getting to the town in time to capture Jenkins, “as he slept in a private residence in Buffalo on the night previous.” Jenkins was transferred to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in December. , (sidebar) , The Methodists were the first congregation in Buffalo. The members met in dwellings and log schoolhouses until January 1833, when they built a frame church in the bottom on High Street beside the Methodist cemetery. Flooding prompted a move to higher ground near Buffalo Academy in 1848. Union troops occupied and burned the church near the war’s end. Later, the congregation received restitution and built this church in 1870.