During the Civil War, Front Royal, a cross-roads town of fewer than 600 residents, was the economic center of Warren County. One soldier called it quite rural, with two small churches, a town pump, irregular streets, and conditions that were terrifically muddy and awfully gloomy. Homes including Bel Air, Rose Hill, Bon Air, Oakley, and Hillcrest, later absorbed into the town, were working farms, and the large plantation Belmont, with vineyards, orchards, and grain fields, lay just south of town. By the end of the war, not a store or business remained open in Front Royal. Belle Boyd, who came there early in the war, used the town as a base for spying activities, was imprisoned twice, reported nearly 30 times, and arrested six times. Confederate Lieutenant Henry Kyd Douglas, aide to Stonewall Jackson, recalled meeting her before the battle at Front Royal in May 1862, when she urged that the Yankee force was very small and that Jackson should charge quickly. Later in the war, six of Confederate Col. John S. Mosby’s Rangers were executed on September 23, 1864, under orders from Union Gen. George A. Custer. As they were brought through town, four were shot, including 17-year-old Henry Rhodes of Front Royal, and the remaining two were hanged from a tree between the town and the Shenandoah River with a warning that this would be the fate of Mosby and all his men. Mosby retaliated by executing several Union troopers, and the practice quickly ended.
