Prospect Hall: Where Meade Got the Command

On a ridge southwest of Frederick, Maryland, a three-story white house of Greek Revival and Federal style has watched more than two centuries of American history pass along the road below it. Prospect Hall was built for Daniel Dulaney, a major Frederick County landowner and colonial civic leader, around seventeen eighty-seven, though the current mansion was probably not completed until eighteen ten. Dulaney's choice of the high ground was deliberate , the site looks out over the surrounding countryside, and from the earliest days of the republic it attracted visitors who wanted to do the same.

Presidents from George Washington to Harry Truman found their way to Prospect Hall at various times in their lives, a roster that reflects the house's location on the main road connecting the mid-Atlantic to the western counties of Maryland and the Shenandoah Valley beyond.

But the most consequential visit came in the early morning hours of June twenty-eighth, eighteen sixty-three, three days before the Battle of Gettysburg began. A presidential messenger arrived at Prospect Hall to wake Major General George Gordon Meade and inform him that he had been appointed commander of the Army of the Potomac, replacing Joseph Hooker, who had clashed with Washington over the army's dispositions. Meade reportedly said he had not sought the command and wished someone else had been given it. He had no time for such reservations. Lee's army was already in Pennsylvania, and the Army of the Potomac was in motion.

Meade led the army at Gettysburg four days later, making the decisions , holding Cemetery Ridge, reinforcing Little Round Top, waiting out Lee's Pickett's Charge , that turned back the Confederate invasion of the North. The command he received at Prospect Hall at dawn on a June morning set the entire course of those events. The house stands today, carefully preserved, on the southwestern edge of Frederick.