Sudley Springs

Sudley Springs. Manassas National Battlefield Park. Before being defined as a Battlefield, this landscape existed as the crossroads hamlet of Sudley Springs. Although it consisted of fewer than a dozen households in 1860, three features distinguished Sudley Springs from neighboring communities - a prosperous mill, a prominent church, and a popular mineral spring., As early as the 1770s, wealthy planters constructed a mill on Catharpin Run to grind wheat into flour. The mill complex attracted auxiliary craftsmen - blacksmiths, wheelrights, and carpenters. A Methodist congregation erected the first of three church buildings here around 1822. The area also boasted a hotel for those attracted to the mineral waters of a nearby spring. Although Sudley Springs recovered from the scars of war, its economy faltered after the mill closed and the hotel burned in the early 1900s. Only Sudley Church remains as a vestige of times past., Sudley Mill served as the economic engine for the area, operating for nearly 150 years. The mill "did such a large business that sometimes the wagons would be lined an eighth of a mile along the road...Here could be seen drags and ox-carts, great Conestoga wagons with their six horses as well as many on horseback with their sacks of grain." The Sudley Springs hotel accommodated the modest crowds drawn to the site's iron rich spring., Images courtesy of the Virginia Historical Society