Martinsburg, Spy Nest, Railroad Town, Strike City
Near Harpers Ferry, West Virginia
Martinsburg, West Virginia has the distinction of being fought over more times than almost any town in America. During the Civil War, control of Martinsburg changed hands thirty-seven times between Union and Confederate forces. The reason was its location: it sat astride the Valley Pike, the main road through the Shenandoah, and more importantly, it was a major hub on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the vital rail line connecting Washington to the Ohio Valley.
In June of eighteen sixty-one, Confederate General Stonewall Jackson entered Martinsburg and set about destroying the infrastructure he could not hold. His men wrecked the roundhouse, burned dozens of buildings, and destroyed fifty-six locomotives and over three hundred railroad cars. It was one of the most systematic pieces of infrastructure sabotage of the entire war.
Martinsburg was also the birthplace and home of Belle Boyd, the most famous Confederate spy of the war. Born here in eighteen forty-four, Boyd cultivated relationships with Union officers occupying the town and passed intelligence to Confederate commanders. She was arrested several times and imprisoned, and eventually became a theatrical celebrity after the war, touring lecture circuits in England and America with dramatic accounts of her espionage career.
The town recovered after the war and rebuilt its railroad infrastructure, including a new roundhouse completed in eighteen sixty-six. Then, on July fourteenth, eighteen seventy-seven, Martinsburg ignited the largest labor action in American history to that point. Baltimore and Ohio workers, furious over a ten percent wage cut imposed while railroad stockholders collected their dividends, refused to move any trains. The stoppage spread within days to Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and cities across the country. The Great Railroad Strike of eighteen seventy-seven, the first truly national industrial strike in American history, began right here in this roundhouse town on the edge of the Shenandoah Valley.
