Williamsport: Where Lee Was Trapped

Williamsport sits at the confluence of Conococheague Creek and the Potomac River, and for two centuries it has been a place where history turned on water levels. Revolutionary War general Otho Holland Williams founded the town in seventeen eighty-seven, and in seventeen ninety Williams wrote to President George Washington suggesting the town as the site for the new federal capital.

The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal arrived in eighteen thirty-four and made Williamsport a busy port on the canal, with two warehouses loading coal from the mountains of western Maryland.

Then came July of eighteen sixty-three. After the defeat at Gettysburg, Robert E. Lee's entire Army of Northern Virginia retreated here and found the Potomac swollen by summer rains and their pontoon bridge destroyed by Union cavalry. For nearly a week, Lee's army sat trapped in entrenchments around this small town while a Union army closed in. Meade hesitated. The river dropped. Lee's army crossed into Virginia on the night of July thirteenth and into July fourteenth, and the war stretched on for nearly two more years.