OLD TOWN WINCHESTER

OR THREE YEARS, Union and Confederate soldiers pounded through the heart of Winchester, Va., shouting, shooting, and dragging wounded comrades into hotels, houses, and stables. The lower Valley gateway town had been a crossroads hub even before George Washington helped to build Fort Loudoun there in the 1750s, but the Civil War’s traffic was destructive. Winchester was a “race-course—one day in the possession of friends, and the next of enemies,” recalled Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan, appointed in 1864