During the Civil War, the Manassas Gap and Orange and Alexandria railroads intersected at Manassas Junction, making it strategically important to both the Union and the Confederacy as a supply depot and military transportation hub, and two of the war’s great battles were fought nearby. Diaries, letters, and newspaper articles recorded the war’s effects on civilians as well as the thousands of soldiers who passed through the junction. By mid-February 1862, as the Union threat to Richmond mounted, Confederate President Jefferson Davis ordered Gen. Joseph E. Johnston to withdraw his forces from northern Virginia to defend the capital, and Johnston began the difficult task on February 23. Supplies had continued to accumulate despite Johnston’s requests to reduce shipments, with huge numbers of boxes and trunks of food, clothing, and personal items crowding the sidings, while the Orange and Alexandria Railroad added a mile-long double track and several freight storage sheds to handle the loaded boxcars. When Johnston undertook the war’s first large-scale military withdrawal, mud-choked roads and a lack of wagons forced reliance on the railroads, but too few boxcars, the lines’ limited capacity, and a panicking civilian population made it impossible to remove everything. The last Confederate soldiers withdrew from Manassas Junction on March 9, burning more than a million pounds of provisions, tearing up track, and destroying railroad bridges over the Shenandoah and Rappahannock Rivers. A Philadelphia Enquirer reporter on March 11, 1862, saw a column of smoke showing Manassas on fire, with machine shops, station houses, the commissary, and quartermaster storehouses in ashes, a wrecked locomotive and ruined freight cars on the track, barrels of flour broken open, vinegar and molasses spilled together, pork and beef scattered in the mud, and smoke rising from the remains of a factory for rendering tallow and boiling bones.
