Wartime Manassas

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, while two of the war’s great battles were fought nearby and diaries, letters, and newspaper articles recorded the war’s effects on civilians and the thousands of soldiers who passed through. 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 that difficult task on February 23. Although he had long urged the Confederate quartermaster office to reduce the supplies being sent there, boxes and trunks of food, clothing, and personal items continued to accumulate, jamming the sidings, while the Orange and Alexandria Railroad added a mile-long double track and built freight storage sheds to handle the loaded boxcars. Mud-choked roads, too few wagons, too few boxcars, limited rail capacity, and a panicking civilian population made it impossible to remove everything during this first large-scale military withdrawal of the war. The last Confederate soldiers left 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, leaving behind a smoking ruin of ashes, wrecked rolling stock, broken barrels of flour, vinegar, and molasses, meat scattered in the mud, and smoke rising from the remains of an industrial site for rendering tallow and boiling bones.

Manassas, Virginia · United States