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The fort sits on a 10-acre rural island of once-glorious farmland in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. The bugles are silent, the heroes are buried, but the earthworks are still there. So is a German-American family’s proud old farmhouse. So is the view down the Martinsburg Pike, where at dusk on September 19, 1864, the ground shook as some 6,000 Union cavalrymen exploded onto the Confederate defenders, positioned in and around Fort Collier. The weight of the Union cavalry assault broke Confederate general Jubal Early’s Army of the Valley, as one Union trooper wrote, “into a thousand fragments under the shock” and sealed the victory for Union general Philip H. Sheridan’s Army at the Third Battle of Winchester. This Union victory marked the beginning of the end for the Confederacy’s control over the Shenandoah Valley, a place that Union forces needed to control to win the Virginia war.

Today, Fort Collier is preserved as the Fort Collier Civil War Center, managed by a board of directors and maintained by volunteers. However, although this place of great historic significance, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has been preserved, Fort Collier needs continuous care. To provide the care that this historic treasure deserves, Fort Collier needs financial support.