Hagerstown: The Hub of the Cumberland Valley

Hagerstown, Maryland sits in the heart of the Cumberland Valley, pressed between the Blue Ridge Mountains to the east and the Allegheny ridges to the west. Jonathan Hager, a German immigrant gunsmith, fur trader, and farmer, founded a settlement here in seventeen sixty-two, building his home over a spring so he would have water even during a siege. That instinct for resilience would prove fitting.

The town grew rapidly because of where it sat. The Warrior Trading Path, an ancient Indigenous route running north to south through the valley, crossed here with the roads leading west toward the Ohio Country. When the National Road, the first federally funded highway in American history, began construction in eighteen eleven, Hagerstown stood on the axis of American movement. Drovers pushed cattle south to Virginia markets. Wagoners hauled freight through the gaps. Merchants built stately brick townhouses along streets that hummed with trade.

The Civil War transformed that commerce into catastrophe. Confederate troops swept through Hagerstown in September of eighteen sixty-two on their way to South Mountain and Antietam. Then in eighteen sixty-three, after Lee's defeat at Gettysburg, his battered army retreated south through Washington County and occupied Hagerstown for more than a week, waiting for the flooded Potomac River to fall enough to cross back into Virginia. Union cavalry under General Judson Kilpatrick rode into town in pursuit and fought a seven-hour battle in the streets. Nearly two hundred soldiers fell in that engagement.

In July of eighteen sixty-four, Confederate General Jubal Early's raiders came through again, this time levying a ransom of twenty thousand dollars and a large supply of clothing against Hagerstown, threatening to burn the town if the citizens failed to pay. The town scraped together the money.

Today Hagerstown anchors the western Maryland corridor that connects the I-Seventy interstate to the Shenandoah Valley. Its nineteenth-century downtown reflects the ambitions of a town that believed, reasonably enough, that it stood at the center of the country.