By Howard Means
In 1876, a Rhode Island army chaplain looked back on the summer a dozen years earlier when he had been serving in the Shenandoah Valley and wrote as follows:
“The 17th of August  will be remembered as sending up to the skies the first great columns of smoke and flame from doomed secession farms, stacks, cribs and mills, and the driving into loyal lines of flocks and herds. The order was carefully yet faithfully obeyed…. The order led to the destruction of about 2,000 barns, 70 mills, and other property, valued in all at 25 millions of dollars” â€” roughly $340 million in current dollars.
A Pennsylvania soldier provided a similar account of the Valley, from the same time. (Both can be found in Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox.)
“Previously the burning of supplies and outbuildings had been incidental to battles, but now the torch was applied deliberately and intentionally. Stacks of hay and straw and barns filled with crops harvested, mills, corn-cribs; in a word, all supplies of use to man or beast were promptly burned….”
All of which leads to the larger question: Why? Not the “why” of the Union strategy in torching barns and mills. That seems clear enough. But why our Burwell-Morgan Mill was spared the consuming flames, especially with battle raging all around the area in that last summer of the War. Is it sheer luck that the Mill survives and is still grinding today? Or was some more specific factor involved?
Theories abound at Clarke County Historical Association and among Burwell-Morgan millers. Perhaps the Mill was spared because the balance of power between opposing armies was ever-shifting in Clarke and Frederick counties, or because Millwood itself was mostly populated by African-Americans. Why burn down what you might soon want to use to your own advantage? And why inflict further suffering on slaves and former slaves who had paid so dearly already?
But these are only guesses, and you â€” readers and CCHA members â€” might well have better insights to offer as to why Burwell-Morgan Mill survived the War in tact.
Howard Means is president of the Clarke County Historical Association. The Clarke County Museum & Archives is located at 32 East Main Street in Berryville, Virginia
Editors Note: Clarke County’s history, like much of the Northern Shenandoah Valley’s, was shaped by the events of the Civil War fought 150 years ago. Many people in Clarke have ancestors who played important roles in the conflict. With those historic connections in mind we invite CDN readers to offer their views on why Millwood’s mill was spared from the Union’s torches. Or if you have other stories about Clarke County and the Civil War we invite you to post below.