Hagerstown, Maryland

• 1. Introduction

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  Hagerstown, Maryland sits at a crossroads that has made it contested, coveted, and strategically vital for nearly three centuries. On the 6th of July, 1864, 1,500 Confederate cavalry rode into this city and handed local leaders a stark ultimatum: pay $20,000 in cash and surrender a large quantity of clothing, or face the consequences. The city paid. That moment captures something essential about Hagerstown. It is a place armies have passed through, merchants have settled into, and railroad lines have converged upon. Tucked between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains in the Great Appalachian Valley, this city of 43,527 people has earned a nickname that explains everything: the Hub City. How did a German immigrant's 200-acre purchase grow into Maryland's sixth-most populous incorporated city? And what does it mean to be a hub in an age when the industries that made you one have shifted beneath your feet?

• 2. Jonathan Hager's Gamble

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  In 1739, Jonathan Hager arrived in the Great Appalachian Valley as a German immigrant from Pennsylvania serving as a volunteer Captain of Scouts. He purchased 200 acres between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains and gave the tract a name both personal and possessive: Hager's Fancy. Twenty-three years passed before he formally founded a town on that land in 1762, and he named it Elizabethtown after his wife, Elizabeth Kershner. The name did not stick in popular memory. By 1813, the city council officially changed the community's name to Hager's-Town to reflect what people had already taken to calling it. The Maryland State Legislature endorsed the change the following year. Hager had done more than found a town. Fourteen years after establishing Elizabethtown, his organizing efforts helped Hagerstown become the county seat of a newly created Washington County, which Hager himself helped carve out of neighboring Frederick County. That work earned him the title the "father of Washington County." The city's connection to its origins runs deep. Hager House, once the founder's home, still stands in Hagerstown City Park and operates as a museum today.

• 3. War at the Crossroads

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  Hagerstown's position at the border between North and South made it a recurring theater of war. Four major Civil War campaigns used the city as a staging area or supply center. In 1861, General Robert Patterson's troops launched operations against Virginia forces in the Shenandoah Valley from Hagerstown's streets. The following year, General James Longstreet's command moved through town while heading toward the Battle of South Mountain and Antietam. In 1863, General Robert E. Lee's army both invaded and retreated through Hagerstown during the Gettysburg campaign. Then came 1864 and the Confederate incursion under Lt. Gen. Jubal Early. Early dispatched Brig. Gen. John McCausland with 1,500 cavalry to levy that $20,000 ransom, along with a large quantity of clothing, as retribution for Union destruction of farms and livestock in the Shenandoah Valley. McCausland's restraint toward Hagerstown stands in sharp contrast to what happened next. On July 30, he razed the neighboring borough of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, after that community refused to meet his demand of $500,000 in U.S. currency, or $100,000 in gold. The dead from those campaigns lingered long after the fighting ended. In 1872, Maryland and Virginia cooperated to move Confederate soldiers from impromptu graves to formal cemeteries in Hagerstown, Frederick, and Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Roughly 60% of those dead remained unidentified. In 1877, approximately 2,800 Confederate soldiers killed at Antietam and on South Mountain were re-interred in Washington Confederate Cemetery within Rose Hill Cemetery in Hagerstown.

• 4. Stone, Rail, and the Hub Economy

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  Hagerstown's built environment carries the geology of the valley it occupies. Stone ridges of upper Stonehenge Limestone run northeast to southwest through the center of town, and the city's older buildings were constructed from this same material. The stone quarries easily and can be dressed on site. As it weathers, it whitens and reveals edgewise conglomerate and wavy laminae that give a distinctive appearance visible in structures like St. John's Episcopal Church. The ridges also shaped the city's neighborhoods, with geography drawing boundaries that street grids alone would not. Industry followed the landscape and the rail lines that cut through the valley. Hagerstown once ran on aircraft, trucks, automobiles, textiles, and furniture. Kreider-Reisner, formed in 1923, merged into Fairchild Aircraft in 1929 and manufactured military and civilian aircraft components in Hagerstown until 1984. The former factory now produces ammunition for rifles and pistols. The city's intersection of Interstates 70 and 81, along with CSX, Norfolk Southern, and the Winchester and Western railroads, made it attractive to e-commerce businesses searching for distribution space during the COVID-19 pandemic. High property prices near Interstate 95 pushed companies toward Interstate 81, and numerous warehouses followed. More recently, Hitachi Rail began construction of a $70 million factory in Hagerstown, a sign that heavy manufacturing did not fully leave.

• 5. Baseball's Long Century

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  Professional baseball arrived in Hagerstown in 1915 and went through so many names and affiliations that tracking them requires a scorecard. The city's first Class D minor league team played in the Blue Ridge League at Willow Lane Park, now the site of Bester Elementary School, under a rotating cast of nicknames: Blues, Terriers, Champs, and finally Hubs. Municipal Stadium was built in 1930, and the Hubs played their last season there. The Blue Ridge League folded in 1931 due to financial losses, and the Hubs moved to Parkersburg, West Virginia. Baseball returned in 1941 when the Detroit Tigers brought a minor league affiliate to town under the name Hagerstown Owls. By 1950, the team had become the Hagerstown Braves as a Boston Braves affiliate, then the Hagerstown Packets as a Washington Senators affiliate in 1954. The Piedmont League dissolved in 1955 and left Hagerstown without a team for over two decades. The Hagerstown Suns arrived in 1981 as a Class A affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles, rose to Double-A by 1989, and then moved to Bowie, Maryland in 1992 to become the Bowie Baysox. A new Hagerstown Suns immediately filled the vacancy, affiliated in turn with the Toronto Blue Jays, San Francisco Giants in 2001, New York Mets in 2005, and Washington Nationals in 2007. Minor League Baseball's 2021 restructuring, which reduced the system to 120 teams, ended the Suns. Municipal Stadium was demolished in 2022. The Atlantic League announced a replacement team on the 1st of September 2021. Fan voting from among five submitted names selected the Hagerstown Flying Boxcars, which opened their inaugural season on the 25th of April 2024, on the road against the York Revolution, before their home opener at the new Meritus Park on the 4th of May 2024.

• 6. A City Changing Its Own Shape

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  Florence Murdock became Hagerstown's first female city council member when she was appointed in 1985. It took another two decades before the first person of color joined the council: Alesia Parson, elected in 2005. The census numbers tell a parallel story of transformation. In the 2000 census, the city was 85.95% White and 10.15% Black. By 2020, those figures had shifted to 62.4% White and 19.9% Black, with 9.8% of the population identifying as Hispanic or Latino of any race and 10.7% identifying as two or more races. The population itself grew from 36,687 in 2000 to 43,527 in 2020. In February 2023, Tekesha Martinez became the city's first Black mayor after the city council unanimously selected her to fill the seat left by Emily Keller, who resigned to join Governor Wes Moore's cabinet. Martinez and Tiara Burnett, both elected in 2020, had already made history as the first Black council members to serve concurrently. Greater Hagerstown's metropolitan population reached 293,844 by 2020, and as of 2009 the metro area was the fastest-growing in Maryland and among the fastest growing in the entire United States, driven largely by people relocating from Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. The Alsatia Mummers Parade, first run in 1921 and held annually during the Halloween season, reflects a city that has held certain traditions across all that change.