The following is transcribed from the New York Times:

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PHILIPPI, W. Va. - The Civil War's first land battle, which took place in the dawn of June 3, 1861 and in which there were only four casualties, none fatal, is to be re-enacted here on its hundredth anniversary. A week's celebration will precede the event, in this picturesque town that lies in the rugged valley of the Tygart River. The Battle of Philippi was a Union victory. Although only a few shots were fired and the clash was finished in a few minutes, it had a disproportionate effect on the subsequent course of the war. This was because it kept the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, linking Washington and the West, in Union hands, and blocked further Confederate efforts to breach the Alleghenies and threaten Ohio, to the northwest. Its most important long-range effect was to strengthen Union sentiment in the area, so that in 1863 West Virginia seceded from the Confederate mother-state of Virginia, retaining allegiance to the North. Three weeks after the fall of Fort Sumter, Gen. Robert E. Lee, commanding Confederate military operations, turned his attention westward. He ordered Col. George A. Porterfield, a fellow-Virginian, to proceed to the western part of the state to recruit volunteers, the region being about equally divided in sentiment between Secessionists and Loyalists. In ordering Colonel Porterfield to sever the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Lee also declared that such a development "would be worth to us an army.”

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Bridges Burned

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          Colonel Porterfield quickly recruited 800 troops, infantry and cavalry, with whom he raided and burned two railroad bridges between Farmington and Mannington. Then he returned to Philippi. When Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, commanding Union forces in the area, learned of the raids, he dispatched 3,000 troops southward. They marched in three columns on the dark, drenching night of June 2. One column was ordered to occupy Talbott Hill, commanding Philippi from the northwest. The other columns were to take positions to cut off retreat to the south. The signal for the coordinated surprise attack by dawn on June 3 was to be in the firing of a pistol. Inadvertently, the attack was prematurely triggered red by a woman, a zealous Confederate sympathizer. This intrepid woman, Mrs. Thomas Humphreys, lived near Talbott Hill and, during the night of June 2, discovered that the Union force was dragging two cannon to the crest, to cover the Rebel force in the town below!

          Her first impulse was to warn Colonel Porterfield of the situation. So she saddled a horse and mounted her young son on it with orders to dash down the hill and alarm the Confederates. But a Federal outpost captured the boy, at which moment Mrs. Humphreys fired a pistol at the shadowy forms in the lane. Thus unwittingly she gave the signal for the Northerners to go into action. McClellan's troops advanced on the town. Townspeople scattered to the hills. Porterfield's startled forces fired a few shots in token resistance, then mounted their horses and streaked off southward along the pike toward Beverly. The Federals pursued hotly for a short distance in what the local press sportingly called "the Philippi races." Thus ended the first land engagement of the Civil War.

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