During the Civil War, the Manassas Gap Railroad and the Orange and Alexandria Railroad intersected at Manassas Junction, making it strategically important to both the Union and the Confederacy as a supply depot and military transportation hub. Two of the war’s great battles were fought nearby, and diaries, letters, and newspaper articles recorded the war’s effects on civilians as well as the thousands of soldiers who passed through the junction. In the days after the First Battle of Manassas on July 21, 1861, Union soldiers circulated extensive rumors accusing Confederate soldiers of atrocities including bayoneting and executing wounded and defenseless Federals, firing on field hospitals, and mutilating the dead. Later in the war, Southerners accused Union soldiers of similar outrages. Objective witnesses did affirm that relic hunting occurred, with visitors carrying off uniforms, arms, buttons, caps, and even skulls from the battlefield. Northern newspapers printed atrocity tales that fueled public demands for revenge, and the Congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, formed in December 1861 after the Ball’s Bluff debacle, investigated. Although much of the testimony was hearsay or fictitious, the committee in May 1862 upheld every horrifying detail as true. Illustrated newspapers then capitalized on the false findings with fanciful depictions of bone ornaments and household furnishings made from the remains of Union dead, and these vivid atrocity images helped rally Northern abolitionists.