Hagerstown

Hagerstown, a city and the county-seat of Washington county, Maryland, U.S.A., near Antietam Creek, about 86 m. by rail W.N.W. from Baltimore. Pop. (1890), 10,118; (1900), 13,591, of whom 1277 were negroes; (1910, census), 16,507. Hagerstown is served by the Baltimore & Ohio, the Western Maryland, the Norfolk & Western, and the Cumberland Valley railways, and by an interurban electric line. It lies in a fertile valley overlooked by South Mountain to the E. and North Mountain, more distant, to the W. The city is the seat of Kee Mar College (1852; non-sectarian) for women. Hagerstown is a business centre for the surrounding agricultural district, has good water power, and as a manufacturing centre ranked third in the state in 1905, its factory products being valued in that year at $3,026,901, an increase of 66.3% over their value in 1900. Among the manufactures are flour, shirts, hosiery, gloves, bicycles, automobiles, agricultural implements, print paper, fertilizers, sash, doors and blinds, furniture, carriages, spokes and wheels. The municipality owns and operates its electric lighting plant. Hagerstown was laid out as a town in 1762 by Captain Jonathan Hager (who had received a patent to 200 acres here from Lord Baltimore in 1739), and was incorporated in 1791. It was an important station on the old National (or Cumberland) Road. General R. E. Lee concentrated his forces at Hagerstown before the battle of Gettysburg.