The frontier-recruited 8th Virginia Regiment was drawn from Augusta, Berkeley, Culpeper, Dunmore (Shenandoah), Fincastle, Frederick Counties in the Shenandoah Valley, the district of West Augusta and Hampshire County which are in present-day West Virginia, and elsewhere along the Virginia frontier, which stretched from Kentucky to Fort Pitt (now Pittsburgh, PA.) Two of the ten companies were raised from the Dunmore County area of Woodstock. It was led by Muhlenberg, Colonel of the regiment and Abraham Bowman, Lt. Colonel, both from Woodstock. The 8th Virginia was called "The German Regiment" though it also contained substantial numbers of Scots-Irish. Frequently separated and detached to other units, the men of this tough, frontier-bred regiment served with distinction in many theatres of the war: White Plains, Trenton, Princeton, Short Hills, Cooch's Bridge, Brandywine, Saratoga, Germantown and Charleston. They suffered the hardships at Valley Forge, and were afterwards mustered out of service, with those who reenlisted merging into other Virginia units.