Maidstone-on-the-Potomac: Doubleday's Crossing, Lee's Retreat

Across the Potomac River from Williamsport, Maryland, sits the Maidstone farm in what is now Berkeley County, West Virginia. Evan Watkins built the original house around seventeen forty-one and ran a ferry here that George Washington used and that General Edward Braddock used on his doomed expedition to Fort Duquesne. In eighteen sixty-one, a Union captain named Abner Doubleday, better known later as the man falsely credited with inventing baseball, crossed here on raids into Confederate territory.

In the summer of eighteen sixty-three, seventy thousand soldiers of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia used this same crossing to retreat back into Virginia after the defeat at Gettysburg. The combination of a pre-Revolutionary house, a ferry that carried both Washington and, later, Lee's beaten army, and a Civil War crossing of that scale makes this one of the more layered acres in the eastern Appalachian corridor.