Search Results in Sharpsburg, MD 1 Results

Sharpsburg is a town in Washington County, Maryland, United States, located approximately 13 miles (21 km) south of Hagerstown. The population was 705 at the 2010 census.

During the American Civil War, the Battle of Antietam (or Battle of Sharpsburg) was fought on what is now Antietam National Battlefield, in the vicinity of Antietam Creek.

History

The first Euromerican to own land in what would eventually become Sharpsburg was the one-time indian trader Edmund Cartledge. By the time Cartledge surveyed his "Hickory Tavern" land tract in 1737, the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road was already well established over the path that would become Sharpsburg's main street. Hickory Tavern is noted in the patent as between the wagon road and Garrison Spring, today's "Big Spring." Thousands of immigrants used this route of the wagon road traveling from Pennsylvania as far south as the Carolinas. On May 1, 1755 the road was used by Major general Edward Braddock, colonial governor Horatio Sharpe and several of Braddock's staff officers to reach Winchester, Virginia while his 48th regiment took a longer route via today's Williamsport, Maryland. Among the officers accompanying Braddock that day was a young Virginia militia officer named George Washington. At the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, Joseph Chapline founded a town, naming it in honor of his friend Horatio Sharpe, the Proprietary Governor of the Province of Maryland. Its original settlers were mostly of German or Swiss origin reaching the area from Pennsylvania via the great wagon road.