Sharpsburg, Maryland

• 1. Introduction

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  Sharpsburg, Maryland is a town of about 560 people tucked into Washington County, roughly 13 miles south of Hagerstown. It sits on land that was once a trader's survey, a colonial crossroads, and then, on a single September day in 1862, the site of the bloodiest single day in all American military history. Nearly 23,000 soldiers fell as casualties at the Battle of Antietam. The town's name, meanwhile, barely appears in the history books outside the South, where the battle is still called the Battle of Sharpsburg. How did a small trading post become a place that changed the course of a nation's war? And what happened to Sharpsburg in the century and a half after the guns fell silent?

• 2. A Crossroads Before the Country

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  Edmund Cartledge, a trader of European descent, was the first to hold a land patent on the ground where Sharpsburg would eventually stand. When he surveyed his "Hickory Tavern" tract in 1737, the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road already ran through it, passing between the wagon road and a spring called Garrison Spring, known today as Big Spring. Thousands of immigrants followed this road southward from Pennsylvania, pushing as far as the Carolinas.

  On the 1st of May, 1755, Major General Edward Braddock and Horatio Sharpe, the Proprietary Governor of the Province of Maryland, rode that same road toward Winchester, Virginia. Among Braddock's staff officers on that journey was George Washington, then a young Virginia militia officer. Braddock's 48th Regiment took a longer path through what is now Williamsport, Maryland, but the road through this future town was well-traveled enough to carry generals.

  At the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, Joseph Chapline founded a proper town on the site and named it for his friend Sharpe. The first settlers were mostly of German or Swiss origin, arriving by the same wagon road from Pennsylvania. They brought wheat farming to a region that had long depended on tobacco. Sharpsburg was formally incorporated in 1832, and industry followed when the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal reached the town in 1836.

• 3. The Bloodiest Day

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  In the summer of 1862, Confederate General Robert E. Lee led his Army of Northern Virginia north into Maryland. Union General George B. McClellan moved to intercept him with the Army of the Potomac. The two forces met near Sharpsburg on the 17th of September, along Antietam Creek.

  The total casualty count for that single day reached nearly 23,000 on both sides. No single day in American military history has produced more dead and wounded. The battle ended in a strategic draw, but that draw carried enormous consequences. Lee had needed a victory on Northern soil. Without it, the Confederacy could not persuade European powers to grant it diplomatic recognition.

  A few days before the main engagement, the multi-sited Battle of South Mountain was fought at three mountain passes: Crampton's Gap, Turner's Gap, and Fox's Gap. Lee's forces tried to slow Union regiments advancing westward along the National Road, now U.S. Route 40 Alternate. That ground is now part of South Mountain State Battlefield Park.

  Lee's retreat from Maryland gave Abraham Lincoln the opening he needed. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring enslaved people in rebelling Confederate territory "forever free." The proclamation made European recognition of the South even less likely, further tightening the Confederacy's strategic position.

• 4. After the War

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  In 1866, just one year after the war ended, African Americans in Sharpsburg built Tolson's Chapel as a Methodist meeting place. The structure also served as a Freedmen's Bureau school. Historians working from the 2000s onward have documented evidence of a once-vibrant "Affrilachian" community in Sharpsburg, a community that faded across the twentieth century.

  Sharpsburg also holds a claim as one of the first towns in the United States to commemorate Memorial Day. The town marked its 147th consecutive such celebration in 2014. The town core was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2008 as the Sharpsburg Historic District. Tolson's Chapel is among the individual properties separately listed on that register, alongside the Antietam National Battlefield, the William Chapline House, the Piper House, and several other historic structures.

  Howell G. Crim, who served as White House Chief Usher from 1938 to 1957, was a native of Sharpsburg. His career spanned nearly two decades at the center of American executive life, a quiet local distinction the town carries alongside its more turbulent Civil War legacy.