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Truth is often stranger than fiction, and a case in point is the story of A. G. Willis, a Civil War hero, executed at the foot of Front Royal mountain and buried in the Baptist Cemetery in Flint Hill. This compares to a “Tale of Two Cities.”
Albert Gallatin Willis served with Mosby’s Rangers, a military unit formed in Front Royal. He had received a furlough and was enroute to visit relatives in Rapidan when his horse went lame south of Flint Hill. Willis stopped at Gaines Crossroads, now Ben Venue, to have his horse tended. As he dried his feet by the forge, the hammering of the smithy drowned out the sounds of approaching Yankees.
Willis and a comrade were taken captive by the soldiers from the north, who had orders from General Grant to “hang a man without trial” in retaliation for the hanging of a Northern spy by Mosby and his men.
Willis was a Baptist ministerial student, and when
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