The Plains, on the Manassas Gap Railroad between Piedmont Station and Manassas Junction, was frequently crossed by troops from both sides during the Civil War. Local resident Edward (Ned) Carter Turner kept a detailed wartime diary; his son, who died while in service, served with Mosby’s Rangers, and his brother was a Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy. On August 30, 1862, after the Battle of Second Manassas, Turner wrote that the fighting part of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia had passed, but that the countryside was full of stragglers or deserters crowding yards and outbuildings, begging for food, and becoming insolent and revengeful when refused. Two days earlier, on August 28, a Federal spy, Jack Sterry, was hanged on an oak tree just east of The Plains after Confederate Gen. John Hood captured him and judged him a "Jessie Scout," a term linked to Jessie Fremont and the use of Confederate uniforms by Federal spies. Sterry was exposed when the soldier whose uniform he had stolen was found nearby, mortally wounded, and identified him before a drum-head court quickly sentenced him. Nearly 75 years later, road workers widening Route 55 uncovered the remains of two soldiers believed to be Sterry and his victim. Another local resident, Dr. Edward Clarke, gathered intelligence by casually carving a notch in a stick for each piece of Union artillery passing his porch on Main St., then sending the notched stick by a manservant to waiting Confederate officers. The place was also misidentified as White Plains in an 1859 edition of the Nine-sheet Map of Virginia, an error repeated in an 1861 Harper’s Weekly engraving caption.