McNeill’s Rangers in the Public Memory of Hardy County, West Virginia

This article uses the McNeill’s Rangers of Hardy County, West Virginia, as a case study that demonstrates the difficulty of interpreting the past of a divided public. The McNeill’s Rangers were a group of partisan Confederate soldiers who, using Hardy County as their main headquarters, fought a guerrilla war against the Union. Following the war, a heroic memory developed within Hardy County, due in part to the rangers, and their supporters, actively reporting their own version of the war. The heroic memory dominated early histories of the rangers and still exists today. In the late 1930s, the state of West Virginia placed a wayside marker in Moorefield, West Virginia, commemorating the rangers. This marker perpetuates the heroic memory and fails to place the rangers within broader context of guerrilla war or Civil War memory. The following article will place Hardy County in its historic context, briefly explain the service of the McNeill’s Rangers in the Civil War, demonstrate how initial memories of the rangers were formed, and discuss contemporary efforts to revise these early romanticized interpretations.

Place: Hardy County, West Virginia

Those who take ownership of history greatly influence that history. History of place, local demographics, culture, and popular memories are influences that persistently work on a history. Hardy County, West Virginia, is located in the eastern portion of the state and borders Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Much of its culture and economy is connected toward places outside West Virginia. The South Branch of the Potomac River flows through the county, creating a fertile farming valley primarily centered on livestock and grain production. Areas of the county east and west of the South Branch Valley are more mountainous and remote. The agriculture industry, primarily poultry farming, remains the predominant industry in Hardy County today. Poultry farmers throughout the region send their livestock to large processing and distribution plants in Rockingham County, Virginia, and in Moorefield, Hardy County’s seat. As of 2013, the population of Hardy County stands slightly under two-million people—95 percent white, 3.5 percent Latino, and 2.9 percent African American.¹ Significant numbers of Moorefield’s minority groups provide labor to poultry plants.² Today’s diverse geography and economy of Hardy County also influenced its historical trajectory.

Hardy County played a critical, yet understudied role in the Civil War and West Virginia’s contested statehood. Large, fertile tracts of land within the South Branch Valley fostered farms labored on by slaves, which, on the eve of the Civil War, were just less than ten percent of the county’s population.³ Wealthy landowners in the region, who dominated the politics of the county, used slave labor to tend to crops and large cattle herds through the Revolutionary and antebellum eras. Yeomen farmers in the mountainous regions tended their smaller farms primarily with the labor of family and neighbors. When war came to Hardy County, the population had divided loyalties. Some supported the planter class and slave system of Old Virginia, while others remained loyal to the Union. The area remained predominately pro-Confederate throughout the war, but citizens took up arms for both armies. The abundant agricultural resources offered by the South Branch Valley made it a location coveted by both the Union and Confederacy. Additionally, its close proximity to important cities in the Shenandoah Valley gave Hardy County strategic and logistic value. Residents of Hardy County regularly saw armies of both the Union and Confederacy inhabit their towns, confiscate their property, and harass enemies. They lived among violence, and often fought among themselves depending on their loyalties. Nationally, the county was removed from the United States and became a part of the Confederacy in the first stages of the war. Then, it was stripped from Virginia and returned to the Union through what many residents would consider an illegitimate West Virginia. Locally, citizens of the county remained split between the planter mentality and pro-Union sympathizers.⁴ After the war, the very pro-Union western portion of the county became Grant County, named for the famed Union general.

Reporting the basic...