Isabelle "Belle" Boyd, a Confederate spy, lived here during part of her childhood after her family moved into the house in 1853, when she was ten, and left in 1858 for a dwelling on South Queen Street. According to Boyd, after Union Gen. Robert Patterson's army occupied Martinsburg in July 1861, she escaped prosecution when she shot and killed a soldier who entered the Queen Street house and insulted her mother, Mary Glen Boyd. In the spring of 1862, while visiting her Aunt Fanny Stewart in Front Royal, Virginia, she first gained fame as a spy on May 23 when, as Confederate Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson and his army approached the Union-occupied town, she ran to the advancing Confederates waving a bonnet and told them the strength of the small Union force. Federal authorities later imprisoned Boyd twice for communicating with the enemy. In December 1863, she sailed for England on a blockade runner carrying diplomatic letters from Confederate President Jefferson Davis; after the ship was captured, she persuaded the Federal naval officer in charge to release her and later married him. Her flamboyant personality, scandalous behavior by the standards of well-bred Southern society, reckless courage, and charm suited a stage career in which she recounted her exploits, and in 1865 she published Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison, blurring the line between fact and legend. Married three times and the mother of four, she died on June 11, 1900, in Kilbourne, Wisconsin.