New Market
Each year, volunteers and cadets reenact the Battle of New Market (May 15, 1864), a Confederate win that was helped by the participation of 257 young cadets from the Virginia Military Institute (VMI). According to VMI, “never before, or since, has an entire college student body been called from their classrooms into pitched battle.” The young men marched 80 miles from Lexington to New Market and then literally lost their shoes in the Bushong family’s fields of wheat and deep mud during the engagement (an area now known as the “Field of Lost Shoes”). Today, at the Virginia Museum of the Civil War and New Market Battlefield State Historical Park, you can walk 300 acres of the battlefield and visit the original Bushong house, barn, blacksmith shop, summer kitchen and orchard, and explore a museum with family and battle artifacts.