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    Manassas: A Place of Passages
    Manassas: A Place of Passages
    Manassas: A Place of Passages
    Ebook176 pages1 hour

    Manassas: A Place of Passages

    By Kathleen Mulvaney and The Manassas Museum System

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    About this ebook

    With its humble beginnings as a small train junction in Virginia’s northern piedmont region, Manassas has evolved from a traditional rural community into a leading city of the New South, serving as a focal point for new businesses and growth outside of our nation’s capital. Though the Civil War left an indelible mark on the character of Manassas, the area’s citizens and post-war newcomers were able to begin anew, building a progressive town, full of promise and hope, upon the four-year conflict’s ashes and battle-scarred landscape. In Manassas: A Place of Passages, this historic town comes alive, allowing the reader to take an entertaining and educational visual journey from the early days of the “Iron Horse” at Manassas Junction in the mid-nineteenth century to a more prosperous Manassas in the early twentieth century, when the streets were newly paved and lined with family-owned businesses. This comprehensive volume touches upon every facet of community life: schools, such as the Manassas Institute and the Manassas Industrial School for Colored Youth; the town’s many historic churches, which were acknowledged, at one time, by Ripley’s Believe It or Not!; several prominent families and civic leaders; and general scenes of people participating in recreational activities, from piano lessons and plays to athletic teams and parades.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439629420
    Manassas: A Place of Passages
    Author

    Kathleen Mulvaney

    Author Kathleen Mulvaney and The Manassas Museum System have compiled an extraordinary visual history with nearly 200 images, complemented with engaging, informative text, which will provide both residents and visitors snapshots of this city�s fascinating history. Manassas: A Place of Passages is truly a fitting testament to the community�s ingenuity and determination. Its remarkable stories will inspire present and future generations.

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      Book preview

      Manassas - Kathleen Mulvaney

      Valley.

      INTRODUCTION

      No one knows for certain how the city of Manassas got its name. Many have speculated as to its origin, and several competing theories have co-existed for generations. Some believe it is a Native American term. Local lore suggests Manassa was the name of a French-Jewish innkeeper in the Shenandoah Valley near Manassas Gap. Those familiar with the Old Testament argue it is a biblical reference to two kings named Manasseh. Little concrete evidence exists to support any one theory.

      The lack of information on the name’s origin is very telling of the community known today as Manassas. Unlike other towns that can point to definitive founding dates, Manassas does not have such a moment. Manassas and its surrounding area, known as the Northern Virginia Piedmont, were settled initially more by chance than by design.

      The Piedmont has always been a place of passages—an in-between place on the way to somewhere else. The first inhabitants were Native American groups, who migrated between the eastern Tidewater region and the Shenandoah Valley, prior to European immigration. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Manahoacs were the largest Native-American group to inhabit the Piedmont, but due to their transitory nature very little is known about them.

      The history of the Piedmont, Prince William County, and Manassas becomes a bit clearer in the eighteenth century. Documentary evidence indicates that in 1724, Robert King Carter patented the Lower Bull Run Tract, which included much of present-day Manassas and western Prince William County. Carter’s descendants established plantations and farms on the Piedmont. For much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, landed gentry, yeoman farmers, slaves, and free African Americans worked the land.

      Life on the Piedmont changed dramatically in the 1850s when two railroads, the Orange & Alexandria and the Manassas Gap, ran lines through the area. For the first time, goods and people could be transported easily to lands near and far. The two lines met in central Prince William County, forming a junction near a small cluster of buildings known as Tudor Hall. The name Tudor Hall quickly became Manassas Junction, and then simply Manassas. A new sense of promise stood on the horizon for the residents of the Northern Virginia Piedmont and the little town at Manassas Junction.

      Unfortunately for Piedmont residents, the sectional struggle between North and South deferred regional growth and prosperity. Instead of crops, the railroad soon carried war supplies and Civil War soldiers. Manassas Junction was a key strategic point along the only continuous railroad connection between Washington, D.C., and the Confederate capital of Richmond, and both sides sought to hold it. Additionally, control of Manassas Junction equaled control of the rail lines to the Shenandoah Valley. The existence of the railroad made the battles and destruction that occurred throughout the Piedmont inevitable.

      During the course of the Civil War, the two opposing armies battled twice near Manassas. On July 21, 1861, Federal troops from Washington attacked Confederate forces along a creek called Bull Run, five miles northwest of Manassas Junction. The Confederates won the battle they called First Manassas; to the Union it was First Bull Run. The armies met again on the same ground on August 29 and 30, 1862. Like the first engagement, the Confederates prevailed at the Second Battle of Manassas. After each battle, the Confederates left Manassas, but not before completely destroying the Junction and everything within miles of it. For the rest of the war, Federal troops held the Junction and forced most residents to leave the area.

      When the war was over, former residents returned to the Piedmont and Manassas to find little left of their homes, farms, and businesses. While the war had obliterated everything that was once Manassas, a bigger, more prosperous town blossomed out of the destruction. By the end of the 1860s, trains once again roared through the Piedmont, and former residents and newcomers from the North banded together to rebuild and improve Manassas. Houses, schools, stores, hotels, and restaurants sprang up quickly around the Junction. Agriculture remained the primary industry in the area, but a new town was growing.

      The late nineteenth century saw significant achievements for Manassas in education and government. The first public school in Prince William County, the Ruffner School, opened in 1872. In 1894, a former slave named Jennie Dean led great strides in African-American education by opening the Manassas Industrial School for Colored Youth, an academic and trade high school. On the government side, the Town of Manassas officially incorporated in 1873, and in 1892 became the seat for Prince William County.

      As the twentieth century dawned, Manassas, still an agricultural community, became an important source of produce and dairy goods for Washington, D.C. Also at this time, Manassas took its first steps toward becoming a suburb of the nation’s capital, as residents began commuting to work in the federal city by train. After World War II, the essence of Manassas began to change as local families sold off farms they had owned for generations to make room for more houses, shopping centers, and industry. By the 1960s and 1970s, the rural nature of Manassas had been altered forever. In 1975 the Town of Manassas was chartered as a city, becoming an independent governmental entity separate from Prince William County. Today Manassas is a 10-square-mile city of nearly 35,000 people, a far cry from the several hundred who lived in the town during the early twentieth century. Many of the residents are new to the area, making their homes in Manassas, but working in other parts of Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C. New high-tech corporations are bringing industry and jobs to the area, continuing the western extension of densely populated, highly developed Northern Virginia.

      Even as Manassas grows and changes, traces of its past are still evident. Today, as throughout its history, the people of Manassas make it an interesting and unique place in

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