I recently started researching my wife's Christianburg, VA relatives and more specifically, her great-grandfather, James Polk Stull, who was married to Nannie Watkins Davis (1850-1902).

James was from Carroll County, Maryland. Carroll County is in northern Maryland, between Baltimore and Frederick. James was one of five sons (John, George, Henry, James, and Daniel) and four daughters (Susannah, Catherine, Harriett, and Elizabeth) of Daniel Stull (1797-1877) and Margaret Gettinger (1805-1893). As reflected in Margaret’s obituary, the Stulls were a prominent Maryland family. Most of the Stulls are buried in Carroll County. (As a side note, it is interesting that at the time, MANY obits for older women were headlined “Death of an Aged Lady.”)

The Stulls were members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. An entry in the Stull Bible — transcription sent to my mother-in-law Nancy, not sure who has the original — includes a membership certificate for Margaret:

This is to certify that Margaret Stull, having been duly instructed in the doctrines and duties of the Christian religion, and found worthy of membership in the Church of God, was admited into full communion with the Evangelical Lutheran Church by the solemn rite of confirmation on the twentieth day of November, 1853.

The pastor, Daniel J. Hauer, offered this prayer:

That the Father of Mercies may ever multiply unto you His grace and peace, and preserve you faithful until the end, and bring you to the happiness of His Kingdom.

In an era in which people did not connect easily with others outside their immediate geographic area, how did James Polk Stull from Westminster, Maryland, marry Nannie Watkins Davis from Christiansburg, VA, nearly 300 miles away? How did they even meet?

I discovered that the connection of the Stulls to Christiansburg predated their marriage. James's sister, Harriett (1833-1908), was married in 1857 to a "master blacksmith" from Maryland, David Wesley Frizzell (1832-1904), and by the 1860 Census, they had moved to Christiansburg, just in time for the Civil War.

At least a partial answer came from my mother-in-law Nancy. I imagine that James must have been visiting his sister in Christiansburg at some point.

Mary Euphemia Davis and William Davis (Nannie’s parents) boarded several girls who attended the Montgomery Female Institute, and an old story says that one Sunday morning these girls were peeking out the front window of the Davis home on Main Street to see the “new man in town” go down the street (they had heard he was handsome). Nannie, younger than the others, said, “You have all the rest, but he’s mine.”“And she got him,” my mother used to say.

David Wesley described his occupation as “retail merchant” on the 1870 Census. The Frizzells reported $7,300 in real estate and a personal estate worth $8,000 on the Census. Their household also included five children and a household staff: a nurse, domestic servant, housekeeper, and cook.

And new next-door neighbors, Harriett's brother, James Polk Stull, and his new wife, Nannie Davis. James worked in the store. So, the Stull/Davis connection was undoubtedly made through James' sister, Harriett. How or why Harriett and her husband moved from Maryland to Christiansburg remains a mystery.

But all this poking around got me thinking about another angle of this story. In 1860, Nannie Davis and her family lived in Christiansburg. Her brothers, William and Eldred, fought for the Confederacy. In 1860, all the male Stulls of military age (John, George, Henry, and, by the end of the war, James) were living in Carroll County, Maryland. A border state.

On which side did they serve?

The answer is confusing. Per Claude.AI…

Maryland was a border state between the Union and the Confederacy, with nearly 85,000 men signing up to join the military. During the Civil War, young males in Maryland fought on both sides, though significantly more fought for the Union than for the Confederacy. Though it was a slave state, only about a fourth of these men joined Confederate units, while the majority joined Union forces.
Official War Department records credit Maryland with 33,995 white enlistments in volunteer regiments of the United States Army and 8,718 African American enlistments in the United States Colored Troops, plus 3,925 Marylanders serving as sailors or marines.
Many pro-Confederate Marylanders left the state early in the war to join Southern forces, particularly after Union troops occupied Maryland in May 1861 to prevent secession. During the early summer of 1861, several thousand Marylanders crossed the Potomac River to join the Confederate Army in Virginia.
Sources: FamilySearch Wiki and Wikipedia

The net-net of my search so far is curious.

I cannot find ANY service records for the Stull brothers during the Civil War. It's like the Civil War skipped over them.