Beaver Dam Creek was a Civil War engagement fought in Virginia, 1862. It was a Union victory.
Second of the Seven Days' Battles. Gen. Robert E. Lee initiated his offensive against McClellan's right flank north of the Chickahominy River. A.P. Hill threw his division, reinforced by one of D.H. Hill's brigades, into a series of futile assaults against Brig. Gen. Fitz John Porter's V Corps, which was drawn up behind Beaver Dam Creek. Confederate attacks were driven back with heavy casualties. Jackson's Shenandoah Valley divisions, however, were approaching from the northwest, forcing Porter to withdraw the next morning to a position behind Boatswain Creek just beyond Gaines' Mill.
Fought on June 26, 1862, in Hanover County, Virginia, the clash at Beaver Dam Creek is also remembered under two other names: Mechanicsville and Ellerson's Mill. This engagement opened the Seven Days Battles, part of the larger Peninsula Campaign fought during the American Civil War, and marked the beginning of the counter-offensive launched by Confederate General Robert E. Lee against Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan's Union Army of the Potomac, a force menacing the Confederate capital at Richmond.
Lee's plan called for Maj. Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson to sweep around the Union right, north of the Chickahominy River, but Jackson could not get his men into position in time. In his absence, Maj. Gen. A.P. Hill committed his own division to the fight, bolstered by a brigade borrowed from Maj. Gen. D.H. Hill, and launched repeated assaults that proved unable to break Brig. Gen. Fitz John Porter's V Corps, entrenched behind the creek. These Confederate charges were repulsed each time, at a steep cost in casualties. Porter managed to pull his corps back to Gaines Mill without incident, though Company F of the 8th Pennsylvania Reserve Regiment, known as the "Hopewell Rifles," never got word of the withdrawal and was left behind.
From the outset, Lee's elaborate scheme unraveled. Exhausted by their previous campaigning
This page covers Beaver Dam Creek. A full Aubrey report for the area pulls together this battle alongside historic sites, land records, and everything else the record holds within a few miles:
Every location is different. Not every section appears for every place, only what the historical record actually holds turns up in a report.
The account on this page is written by Aubrey Research from cited sources. Wikipedia is cited as a reference; its text is not reproduced.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.