by Dan Wright, The Daily News-Record

Between Harrisonburg and Dayton off Va. 42, Meigs Lane runs east a short distance past businesses and a farm.

During the Civil War, that short lane was called Swift Run Gap Road. It continued over the hills and crossed the Valley Pike as it wound toward Elkton.

Killed By Scouts

On the rainy evening of Oct. 3 1864, Lt. John R. Meigs, 22, and two other Union soldiers had turned onto Swift Run Gap Road to return to headquarters in Harrisonburg.

As they overtook three Confederate scouts, Meigs called on them to halt. One of the Rebels demanded that Meigs surrender. After a quick exchange of gunfire, Meigs lay dead in the road that would later bear his name.

The death of a Union officer during the Civil War wouldn't have attracted much attention except that Meigs was no ordinary officer, according to Mary Giunta, formerly with the National Archives and Records Administration.

He was the son of Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, quartermaster of the U.S. Army and grandson of Commodore John Rodgers, a U.S. Navy hero in the Revolutionary War. He graduated from West Point first in the class of 1863. He was chief engineer and aide de camp of Gen. Philip H. Sheridan.

When Sheridan heard of Meigs' death, he ordered the town of Dayton and surrounding area burned. Sheridan had been plagued by partisan rangers, guerillas and bushwhackers in the Shenandoah Valley. One of the soldiers who was with Meigs that night reported the lieutenant had been killed in cold blood by civilians. Sheridan considered it murder.

About 30 houses and barns were burned before Sheridan learned that Confederate soldiers had killed Meigs in a fair fight. He rescinded the order.

The elder Meigs remained conviced his son had been murdered and hired a private detective to find out what happened, an effort that continued after the war.

Gen. Meigs had his son's body laid to rest at Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Later, the body was moved to Arlington National Cemetery, which the general had helped create in mid-1864 on land that had belonged to Robert E. Lee.

A statue of the young lieutenant was cast exactly as he was found in the road, with his service revolver near his hand.

Gen. M eigs died in 1892 and was interred at Arlington National Cemetery, in a grave near that of his son.

Young Meigs

Born Feb. 9, 1842, John Rodgers Meigs was the son of a military family and was raised in a strict household.

“The blood of Meigs was duty, honor and country,” Giunta said. “He had to be a bright, honorable and brave man and there was much pressure on him.”

Giunta writes of Meigs being disciplined with a thin whalebone strip used to stiffen corsets. On one occasion, “Montgomery whipped him with a rope.”

But his parents were also loving and caring, Giunta added. They provided Meigs with excellent education opportunities, including religious instruction, time to pursue hobbies and visit with friends and family.

Meigs was very bright in science and mathematics and entered West Point in the fall of 1859. Two years later, with the Civil War underway, his father wrote to him with stern instruction: “Be able to show yourself the soldier of Christ and of your country.”

After graduating from West Point, Meigs engineered the defenses of Baltimore, built pontoon bridges in Virginia and West Virginia and went on cavalry raids with Gen. William W. Averell.

He was an extensive, if sometimes crude, map maker. “He walked his horse, counted the strides of the horse, measured the horse's stride and did the math,” Giunta said. “He also marked houses [on his maps] U or R to indicate if the resident was Union sympathizer or Rebel."

Meigs was familiar with the important roads, streams and crossings and the general terrain of the Shenandoah Valley, according to John Heatwole, historian and author of “The Burning.”

That knowledge made him valuable. “Sheridan relied on Meigs for surveys and map making,” Giunta said.

That Fatal Night

Giunta is compiling a book, “A Civil War Soldier of Christ and Country: the Selected Correspondence of John Rodgers Meigs 1859 – 1864,” to be published next year.

The book includes a letter from Meigs' mother to her sister. In it, Louisa Rodgers Meigs describes her son's trunk, camp stool and clothing. The jacket had a bullet hole just over the heart, the hat and cloak were splattered with blood.

“These cast off garments seem to tell me the whole story,” Mrs. Meigs wrote. “I take them out and look at them again and kiss and hold in my embrace the dear hat which still retains the perfume of his hair.”

The men who killed Meigs were not granted amnesty at the war's end, Heatwole noted. Meigs' father had offered a reward for their capture.

One of them, Frank Shaver, was with the First Virginia Cavalry. The other two men, George Martin and F.M. Campbell, had been with the Fourth Virginia Cavalry.

Both Shaver and Campbell claimed to have killed Meigs. Martin did not fire his weapon, but was shot in the groin by Meigs. Heatwole counts at least three shots being fired, possibly as many as five or six.

Both bullets that hit Meigs – one in the right eye and one in the chest – were killing shots, Heatwole added.

Heatwole and a 1925 account by Peter Cline Kaylor tell a story of men who came to a Harrisonburg barber shop – after the war – looking for Shaver. A customer slipped out the back and rode to the farm of Levi Shaver with a warning that men were looking for his son.

The elder Shaver sent word to Frank to disappear for a while.

When the men arrived at his farm, Shaver told them his son was working in one of the fields and was expected home soon. He welcomed the men to his home with hospitality characteristic of the South. The afternoon passed into evening as Mrs. Shaver served them dinner, cider, coffee and pie.

Eventually, the men grew tired of waiting and left.

For some time after the war, Frank Shaver was forced to dodge people who wanted to claim the reward offered by Montgomery Meigs.

As the former general aged, the memory of his son's death faded and he was less occupied with revenge, allowing Shaver to live a more normal life, Heatwole explained.

Shaver owned a farm in the area southeast of U.S. 11 near Pleasant Valley Road. He married and had one son.

Frank Shaver is buried in the Early family cemetery near Pleasant Valley.