Travel: Relive the Civil War in Frederick, Maryland
People find all sorts of reasons to visit Frederick, Maryland. They go to browse through the many antiques stores and other little shops. To eat in the restaurants in the compact downtown area. To tour the 50-block historic district with its solid antebellum brick buildings and its elegant churches that led the poet John Greenleaf Whittier to call Frederick a city of “clustered spires.” They used to come to wage war.
“For three days I was nearly continually looking at the Rebel army passing,” noted Jacob Engelbrecht, a diarist and future Frederick mayor, in September 1862. The Rebels, soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia under Gen. Robert E. Lee, passed through the town in the days before the bloody battle of Antietam. A photographer on a balcony of a downtown store took a picture of one Rebel column lined up in center of town where the old National Road crossed Market Street. In it the soldiers have their rifles on their shoulders, and a couple of them look quizzically up at the photographer.
The Civil War provided Frederick with some turbulent times; now it gives visitors opportunities to seek out fascinating history. Begin a journey into Frederick’s Civil War by stepping into the visitor center at 19 East Church Street and loading up on maps and brochures. Then cross the street to Kemp Hall, a tall brick building where a special session of the Maryland legislature met in April 1861 to decide if Maryland should secede from the Union. In the end, the legislature sidestepped the issue by declaring it didn’t have the constitutional authority to vote for secession. Such a step required a state convention—and the legislature wouldn’t vote to establish a convention either.
War came anyway, and passing armies from both sides often choked Frederick’s streets with men, horses, and wagons. Among them were Maj. Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and his men, who inspired Frederick’s most famous tale of the Civil War. The story goes that when the troops marched through town, Barbara Fritchie (or Frietschie), who was in her mid-nineties, defiantly flew an American flag from her attic window. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier immortalized the encounter: “’Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,/ But spare your country’s flag,’ she said./ A shade of sadness, a blush of shame,/ Over the face of the leader came;/ The nobler nature within him stirred/ To life at that woman’s deed and word;/ ‘Who touches a hair of yon gray head/ Dies like a dog! March on!’ he said.”
Alas, the incident never happened. As Jacob Engelbrecht, who lived nearby, noted, “Should anything like that have occurred I am certain someone of our family would have noticed it.” But in a testimony to the power of myth, Fritchie’s reconstructed house, a little brick-and-dormer structure alongside Carroll Creek on West Patrick Street, is now a museum.
Fritchie herself died in December 1862, at 96, and she now shares nearby Mt. Olivet Cemetery with Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and with Maryland’s first governor, Thomas Johnson. What would she have felt about the cemetery’s monuments to Confederate dead, and the long line of Confederate tombstones?
If Fritchie’s tale is myth, Jackson’s arrival is real enough. On Sunday, September 7, he worshipped at the Evangelical Reformed Church on Church Street, sleeping through the service and the prayer for President Lincoln. Jackson, Lee, and Maj. Gen. James Longstreet established their headquarters south of town, where Lee wrote Order No. 191 to outline his plans for his subordinates. Later a Union soldier found a copy of the order wrapped around three cigars and dropped at a farm. When the information reached the Union’s Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, it spurred the cautious commander into action. After the Battle of Antietam, Lee was forced to retreat south.
President Lincoln visited Frederick after Antietam, and he stopped to see a wounded Union general in the Ramsey House, at 119 Record Street. The building now is the Lincoln House condominiums. Another near victim of the Confederate incursion was no general but rather an iron dog that Dr. John Tyler kept on his porch at 108 West Church Street. Rebel soldiers kidnapped the dog to melt it down, but it was recovered and returned to its home. It remains there today.
On East Patrick Street, the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, in a building that served as a combination furniture and undertaking business during the war, uses artifacts, photographs, and full-scale recreations to shed light on a fascinating but often misunderstood part of the conflict. The doctors of the 1860s were well-educated, knowledgeable men, says George Wunderlich, the museum’s executive director. “This idea that they were just a bunch of butchers and didn’t know what they were doing is absolutely and completely false.”
Still, some of their handiwork is not for the faint of heart. Bob Hess, a volunteer at the museum, tells the story of a middle-school student who passed out during a tour when he spied a photograph of a small stack of severed limbs, taken outside a hospital in Washington, D.C. “He just keeled over,” says Hess. “Boom. Right on the floor.”
Frederick, too, saw plenty of severed limbs, as Union and Confederate wounded flooded into town after Antietam and following another battle that raged along the banks of the nearby Monocacy River on July 9, 1864. The Battle of Monocacy, “the battle that saved Washington,” pitted a Confederate army of about 15,000 men led by Lieut. Gen. Jubal Early against 5,800 Federals under Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace (later famous as the author of Ben Hur).
The Monocacy National Battlefield’s current visitor center occupies a small stone building that was once James H. Gambrill’s gristmill. Gambrill, a Southern sympathizer, took shelter beneath his water wheel when fighting broke out around him. (A new visitor center, scheduled to open next spring, is under construction off Route 355.) From the mill, a path on a raised ramp goes down to the now-peaceful Monocacy.
The visitor center also offers maps of a driving tour that takes in the Thomas and Worthington farms, scenes of much bitter fighting that now lie on opposite sides of busy Interstate 270, which cuts right through the battlefield. The old Worthington farmhouse stands by itself on a slight rise above a cow pasture. The brick building is nicely painted on the outside, but a look through the windows reveals a gutted and peeling interior. During the battle, six-year-old Glenn Worthington watched the fighting from the house’s basement. He later wrote a book about Monocacy and spearheaded the effort to preserve the battlefield.
From the house, a 1.6-mile walking trail skirts the edge of a field and descends to the shady woods along the banks of the languid Monocacy. Confederate troops forded the river near here and attacked the Union left, forcing the outnumbered Federals to retreat past the Thomas farm and the Gambrill Mill and back toward Baltimore.
Wallace’s men lost the battle, but the defeat paid dividends for the Union. Early’s Confederates reached Washington, D.C.’s thinly manned outer defenses at the same time as troops hastily dispatched from Virginia by Ulysses S. Grant. “If Early had been but one day earlier,” Grant wrote in his memoirs, “he might have entered the capital before the arrival of the reënforcements I had sent. Whether the delay caused by the battle amounted to a day or not, General Wallace contributed on this occasion, by the defeat of the troops under him, a greater benefit to the cause than often falls to the lot of a commander of an equal force to render by means of a victory.” Barbara Fritchie could rest easy.
Frederick is a straight shot from Washington, D.C. on Interstate 270, from Gettysburg on Route 15, and from Baltimore on Interstate 70. The Frederick County visitor center, at 19 East Church Street, is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. For visitor information or a guide, visit www.fredericktourism.org or call (800) 999-3613. The Museum of Civil War Medicine, 48 East Patrick Street, is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday from 11 to 5. Admission is $6.50 for adults, $6.00 for seniors, the military, and college students, and $4.50 for children 10 to 16. Visit www.civilwarmed.org or call (301) 695-1864. The museum recently opened a branch at the Philip Pry House on the Antietam Battlefield. The Monocacy National Battlefield is at 4801 Urbana Pike (Route 355). Its visitor center is open Memorial Day through Labor Day from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the rest of the year from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Visit www.nps.gov/mono or call (301) 662-3515.