With the beginning of the Civil War, both the North and South saw the mountains of western Virginia as a strategically vital area. The region was seen as the source of thousands of tough recruits and of essential raw materials, an important staging area for attacks into the heartland of their opponents, and it was traversed by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, one of only two east-west railroads in the country at that time.

When Confederate troops threatened the B&O at Grafton the federal government quickly moved troops into the area. On the night of June 3, 1861, the first land battle of the Civil War involving organized troops took place at Philippi, about 15 miles south of Grafton. Some 3,000 federal troops under the general command of Major General George B. McClellan and the immediate command of Colonels Benjamin F. Kelley and Ebenezar Dumont drove about 800 Confederates under Colonel George A. Porterfield from the town. While no one was killed in the battle, the Confederates suffered several severe wounds necessitating the first amputations of the Civil War, one each by Union and Confederate surgeons.

The Northern victory stiffened Unionist resolve in western Virginia. On June 11, the first Wheeling Convention voted to nullify the Virginia ordinance of secession, declared the offices of the state government at Richmond vacated, and named Francis H. Pierpont governor of the restored government of Virginia. The victory also secured the Baltimore & Ohio for the Union and played an important part in General McClellan's meteoric rise to the command of the Army of the Potomac.

The Federal strategy at Philippi included what was probably the first employment of the railroad to effect the convergence of divergent forces upon an enemy in world history.

See also Baltimore & Ohio, Civil War, Wheeling Conventions

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