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NEWS
July 14, 2024
By Zach Brooks and Abigail Koontz There’s a new exhibit at the Miller House Museum in downtown Hagerstown that recalls one of the most dramatic incidents in the city’s history. As if July were not hot enough, in the summer of 1864, the fourth summer of the Civil War, Confederate Brig. Gen. John McCausland rode into town and demanded $20,000 and 1,500 sets of clothing for his cavalrymen. And if Hagerstown’s residents did not meet the demand within four hours, he promised to burn the whole town down. By the afternoon of July 6, McCausland — who was part of a Confederate contingent led by Lt. Gen. Jubal Early and bent on taking the war straight to Washington — had taken control of Hagerstown. Mayor John Cook, a merchant, had fled north. McCausland convened with Councilman Matthew S. Barber, who also was treasurer of the Hagerstown Bank, and bank teller John H. Kausler at Byer’s Drug Store in Public Square; and then again, joined by Hagerstown Bank president and former Congressman James Dixon Roman, at the Washington County Courthouse. They reached an agreement to raise the $20,000, though there was a dispute over the provision of 1,500 suits of clothes. Eventually, McCausland […]
August 23, 2018
Have you been out to see our new exhibit yet? Check out the great coverage from WDVM and then come out to see it for yourself! A Servant’s Life Exhibit – WDVM
June 13, 2018
I’ve been thinking a lot about ladies recently. Besides being an absolutely delightful one myself, I spend a lot of time around powerful, accomplished, intelligent women who work hard every day to make life better for those around them. On a much larger scale, it is impossible to deny that American women are once again in the spotlight, receiving national attention as we define women’s rights, roles, and personal agency moving into the 21st century. American women were doing much the same 100 years ago as the world moved into the 20th century. Questions about women’s rights, roles, and personal agency needed to be answered for a rapidly changing world. The answers to those questions revealed themselves in a variety of ways – in the passage of the 18th and 20th Amendments, which started Prohibition and granted women the right to vote, respectively, and in the swift and major changes in women’s apparel from the 1890s to the 1920s. While changes in fashion might seem frivolous next to major political change, women’s clothing and activities have always closely reflected that society’s attitudes towards women. Women’s leisure clothing saw the largest innovations and changes as women gained more agency within American […]
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