During the Civil War, the Manassas Gap and the 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 point, and two of the war’s great battles were fought nearby. Diaries, letters, and newspaper articles recorded the war’s effects on civilians and on the thousands of soldiers who passed through the junction. In 1861, the U.S. Army had only 30 surgeons and 84 assistant surgeons, and a third resigned to join the Confederacy. Few military hospitals existed, little planning had been done, and once fighting began most soldiers were treated in field-hospital tents like those erected here before and after the First Battle of Manassas on July 21, 1861. Wounded soldiers endured heat, humidity, insects, mud, unsanitary conditions, and exposure to contagious diseases from fellow patients, while those treated in civilian homes often fared better than those in field hospitals. After the battle, some regiments reported that more than 75 percent of the men on medical rolls died not from wounds but from measles, typhoid fever, and diarrhea in epidemic proportions. Capt. Ujanirtus Allen of Company F, 21st Georgia Volunteer Infantry, wrote to his wife in October and November 1861 about very sick men, efforts to improve camp sanitation, the lingering effects of camp fever, and his own illness while staying in a private house near Sudley Church, where he received attentive nursing far from home. Allen survived that illness but was mortally wounded at Chancellorsville on May 2, 1963.
