![]() ![]() Kelly's new bridge" in 1836 cited his mill as "a manufacturing establishment upon a large scale," and the 1850 census of manufacturers noted a mill producing 100 barrels of flour a day, a cloth factory, an up-and-down sawmill, a blacksmith and wheelwright shop, cooper shop, shoe factory and creamery. Since the 1820s, a mill village usually called Kellysville on the Culpeper side of the river had been the largest community on the Rappahannock upstream from Fredericksburg. Then, the river was often called Hedgeman's River, for Nathaniel Hedgeman, who had received several land grants in 1712-14. The Kellys had lived at the ford since Colonial times, when Hedgeman's River Baptist Meetinghouse stood on the heights above the Fauquier bank. ![]() Sioux villages had lined both banks, up and downriver from the ford. The ford had been a major Rappahannock River passage since prehistoric times, when ancestors of the Susquehannock and Iroquois Indians crossed it on their north-to-south migrations. But high water caused by heavy winter snows precluded a crossing downriver from Kelly's Ford. Once the weather broke, Union forces were eager to cross the river to destroy the main Confederate supply line, the Richmond-to-Shenandoah Valley rail link at Gordonsville in Orange County. Union forces held the Fauquier bank of the Rappahannock during the winter of 1862-63, while Confederate pickets patrolled the Culpeper bank and guarded the major fords. His adroit and unrelenting marksmanship in Jeb Stuart's Valley and Peninsular campaigns, and at Fredericksburg and Antietam, had led Stuart to write, "No field grade is too high for his merit and capacity." The battle also claimed the life of one of the South's most accomplished artillerymen, Maj. But for the first time in the Civil War, the Union cavalry proved its mettle was nearly that of Confederate horsemen. The encounter on the Rappahannock River was minor in terms of troops involved, about 2,900, and casualties, about 210. Tomorrow marks the 140th anniversary of the Battle of Kelly's Ford. ![]()
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