8th Ohio Cavalry Regiment
military unit
The 8th Ohio Cavalry Regiment was a regiment of Union cavalry raised by the state of Ohio for service during the American Civil War. It served in the Eastern Theater, primarily in West Virginia and then in the Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia.
Organization and service
The 8th Ohio Cavalry Regiment was formed on January 4, 1864, from among members of the former 44th Ohio Infantry, under the command of Col. Samuel Augustus Gilbert. Organized and mustered into service in March 1864 at Camp Dennison in Cincinnati, it first served in West Virginia and was attached to 1st Brigade, 2nd Cavalry Division, Army of West Virginia. It saw considerable service during the Valley Campaigns of 1864 under Philip H. Sheridan, fighting in several key battles that led to the defeat of the Confederate Army of the Valley.
In a predawn raid on 3 Oct. 1864, Confederate Captain John McNeill led approximately 50 Confederate rangers against roughly 100 Union troopers of the 8th Ohio Cavalry Regiment guarding a Meems Bottom bridge at Mt. Jackson, Virginia, a strategic crossing of the Valley Turnpike over the North Fork of the Shenandoah River. The attack lasted just fifteen minutes with most of the detachment of the 8th Ohio Cavalry were captured but McNeill, one of the best-known and feared Confederate partisan raiders as leader of McNeill's Rangers, was mortally wounded.
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This entry incorporates text from “8th Ohio Cavalry Regiment” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.