Hancock: Maryland at Its Narrowest

Right here at Hancock, the state of Maryland is less than two miles wide. The Potomac River presses in from the south and Pennsylvania closes in from the north, and the whole state squeezes down to a strip narrower than some city blocks are long. A settler named Joseph Hancock ran a ferry across the Potomac here, and the community that grew up eventually took his name.

The National Road came through around eighteen eighteen, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal arrived in the eighteen thirties, and for a time Hancock was a busy junction where road traffic and canal boats converged. George Washington passed through the area on survey expeditions before the Revolution. Today Interstate Seventy threads through the same mountain gap that the National Road used two centuries ago.

The geography never changed. Maryland is still absurdly narrow here, and the road still goes straight through.