Fulton County and the Gettysburg Campaign

Fulton County, formed April nineteenth, eighteen fifty, was carved out of Bedford County and named for Robert Fulton, the steamboat inventor. The county seat, McConnellsburg, was incorporated in eighteen fourteen.

But Fulton County holds a more dramatic footnote in Civil War history. In the summer of eighteen sixty-three, Confederate forces crossing into Pennsylvania on their way to Gettysburg are said to have suffered their first casualties of that campaign in this county. And in eighteen sixty-four, after the war's tide had turned, Fulton County is said to have hosted the Confederacy's final campsite on Pennsylvania soil. The county thus brackets the arc of Southern ambition in the North: where the invasion began to bleed, and where it camped for the last time before the end.