The Fort Mill Ridge Civil War Trenches are battle trenches originally dug between 1861 and 1862 and lined with chestnut logs by the Confederate artillery during the American Civil War to defend the approaches to Romney on the Northwestern Turnpike and the South Branch Potomac River. The trenches were then refurbished between March and June 1863 by the 54th Pennsylvania Infantry and the 1st West Virginia Infantry. When Colonel Jacob M. Campbell (54th PVI) garrisoned Union forces at Romney, camps were set up at nearby at Mechanicsburg Gap.
The Fort Mill Ridge trenches are believed to be the best preserved battle trenches dating from the Civil War in existence. The trenches are located three miles southwest of Romney adjacent to the Fort Mill Ridge Wildlife Management Area off of the Northwestern Turnpike (U.S. Route 50/West Virginia Route 28).
A Civil War museum relating to the construction and use of the Fort Mill Ridge trenches is located within the Taggart Hall Civil War Museum & Visitors Center on the corner of High Street and Gravel Lane in downtown Romney.
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“How often we read that the enemy occupied a position which commanded the old, and so the fort was evacuated! Have not the school-house and the printing-press occupied a position which commands such a fort as this?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Sidney Arodin, U.S. songwriter. “Lazy River,” Peer International Corp. (1931)
“The self-consciousness of Pine Ridge manifests itself at the village’s edge in such signs as “Drive Keerful,” “Don’t Hit Our Young ‘uns,” and “You-all Hurry Back”Mlocutions which nearly all Arkansas hill people use daily but would never dream of putting in print.”
—Administration in the State of Arka, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
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—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)