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The Civil War decimated both the region and Martinsburg, specifically because of the railroad yards. On May 22, 1861, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson's troops stopped all trains going east at Martinsburg and Point of Rocks during the Great Train Raid of 1861. Once he determined that all of the trains that could be caught were in his trap, he blew up ...
For the immediate time being, "B&O trains continued to run, with many interruptions and only with the consent of Virginia." [3] Colonel Jackson realized that Harper's Ferry held not only important arms production factories, but was a choke-hold on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, and key telegraph trunk lines connecting Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, D.C. to ...
When the Civil War ended, a boom in railroad construction ensued, with roughly 35,000 miles (55,000 kilometers) of new track being laid from coast to coast between 1866 and 1873. The railroads, then the second-largest employer outside of agriculture , required large amounts of capital investment, and thus entailed massive financial risk.
The B&O reached Wheeling, West Virginia (then part of Virginia) on January 1, 1853. That would remain the terminus through the American Civil War (apart from conflict-related outages principally between Cumberland and Martinsburg during the war) until a railroad bridge could be constructed across the Ohio River.
Views in and Around Martinsburg, Virginia by A. R. Waud (Harper's Weekly, December 3, 1864). The U.S. state of West Virginia was formed out of western Virginia and added to the Union as a direct result of the American Civil War (see History of West Virginia), in which it became the only modern state to have declared its independence from the Confederacy.
Martinsburg was established by an act [7] of the Virginia General Assembly that was adopted in December 1778 [8] during the American Revolutionary War. Founder Major General Adam Stephen named the gateway town to the Shenandoah Valley along Tuscarora Creek in honor of Colonel Thomas Bryan Martin, a nephew of Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron.
Losses were far higher than during the war with Mexico, which saw roughly 13,000 American deaths, including fewer than two thousand killed in battle, between 1846 and 1848. One reason for the high number of battle deaths in the civil war was the continued use of tactics similar to those of the Napoleonic Wars, such as charging.
Maria Isabella "Belle" Boyd was born on May 9, 1844, in Martinsburg, Virginia (now part of West Virginia). [10] She was the eldest child of Benjamin Reed and Mary Rebecca (Glenn) Boyd. [ 11 ] She described her childhood as idyllic. [ 12 ]