The Hessian Barracks: Prisoners, Pioneers, and the Deaf
Near Harpers Ferry, Maryland
Just off the main streets of Frederick, Maryland, stands a large stone building with a history that touches nearly every chapter of early American life. The Hessian Barracks, begun in seventeen seventy-seven and completed by seventeen eighty-one, were intended to house Maryland volunteers during the Revolution. They almost immediately became something else: a prison.
The first inmates arrived following the British surrender at Saratoga in seventeen seventy-seven. More than a thousand German mercenaries, the Hessians hired by King George to fight the American colonists, were marched south through the Maryland backcountry and confined here. Additional prisoners from Yorktown arrived in seventeen eighty-two, and at peak capacity the compound held roughly fifteen hundred men. Those soldiers lived in conditions that were harsh by any measure, though the stone walls and steady food supply made Frederick a better fate than many prisoner-of-war camps that followed in later centuries.
After the Revolution the barracks cycled through uses that chart the young country's growth. French sailors were quartered here in seventeen ninety-nine during the Quasi-War with France. In eighteen hundred and two, Meriwether Lewis stopped in Frederick to collect supplies and men for the western expedition he and William Clark would lead the following year. The building served briefly as a staging ground for what would become one of the great exploring journeys in American history.
The War of eighteen twelve brought another round of troops. General Lafayette passed through on his celebrated farewell tour in eighteen twenty-four. When the Civil War erupted, the barracks became a hospital for Confederate and Union wounded alike, receiving men from the carnage at South Mountain and Antietam.
In eighteen sixty-eight, the surviving wing of the original complex was converted into the Maryland School for the Deaf, a purpose it still serves today. One of the two original L-shaped stone buildings stands on that campus, older than the nation it has outlasted, worn and solid in equal measure.
