History of Frederick

on off Jefferson Street to Buckeystown Pike near what is now Butterfly Lane, in the early morning hours of June 28, 1863, a messenger from President Abraham Lincoln and General-in-Chief Henry Halleck arrived to inform General George Meade that he would be replacing General Joseph Hooker after the latter's earlier disaster at Chancellorsville in May. The Army of the Potomac, which was camped around the Prospect Hall property for the last several days in pursuit of Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia prior to Gettysburg, went on to fight several major battles. A large granite rectangular monument made from one of the boulders at the "Devil's Den" in Gettysburg to the east along the driveway commemorates the midnight change-of-command. The National Museum of Civil War Medicine is located downtown on East Patrick Street with many exhibits on the state of medicine and surgery under the extreme war-time strains.

Due west along the National Road, now Alternate U.S. Route 40, and west of Burkittsville, lie the sites of three episodes in the Battle of South Mountain: the battles of Crampton's (September 14, 1862), Fox's, and Turner's Gaps, where Confederate troops under Jackson and Walker unsuccessfully attempted to halt the Federal army's westward advance into the Cumberland Valley and towards Sharpsburg in Washington County. The War Correspondents' Memorial stone arch erected by reporter/editor George Alfred Townsend (1841-1914) can be found at Gathland State Park at Crampton's Gap, just west of Burkittsville. The 1889 memorial by Union soldiers of his IX Corps to the slain Major General Jesse L. Reno lies on the south side of the National Road, Alternate U.S. Route 40, west of Middletown, just below the summit of Fox's Gap on Reno Monument Road, along with a more recent Confederate memorial from 1993 to Brig. Gen. Sameul L. Garland, Jr., who was also killed along with a monument