Events for December 2024

June 29 @ 11:00 am 12:00 pm

To commemorate the 160th Anniversary of the Ransom of Hagerstown, the WCHS will be offering a walking tour of Downtown Hagerstown as part of our our June 29, 2024, Public History Day.

Stephen Bockmiller, author of Follow the Money: The 1864 Confederate Ransom of Hagerstown, Maryland, will lead guests through the streets of downtown Hagerstown, recounting historical events as they took place on July 6, 1864, when Brigadier General John McCausland and 1,500 Confederate soldiers entered Hagerstown and held the town ransom.

The walking tour will cover a little under a mile of walking distance, roughly 7 blocks of downtown Hagerstown around Public Square, lasting 50 to 60 minutes.

$20 – $25
135 West Washington Street, Hagerstown, MD 21740
Hagerstown, MD 21740 US
+ Google Map
May 28, 2024

Ransom of Hagerstown Walking Tour

To commemorate the 160th Anniversary of the Ransom of Hagerstown, the WCHS will be offering a walking tour of Downtown Hagerstown as part of our our June 29, 2024, Public History Day. Stephen Bockmiller, author of Follow the Money: The 1864 Confederate Ransom of Hagerstown, Maryland, will lead guests through the streets of downtown Hagerstown, recounting historical events as they took place on July 6, 1864, when Brigadier General John McCausland and 1,500 Confederate soldiers entered Hagerstown and held the town ransom. The walking tour will cover a little under a mile of walking distance, roughly 7 blocks of downtown Hagerstown around Public Square, lasting 50 to 60 minutes.
February 15, 2024

Patsy Cline Cover Concert

Attention all Patsy Cline fans! Join us Friday, July 19 at 6:00 PM to enjoy an unforgettable night filled with music at the beautiful Miller House Garden! A legendary country singer, Patsy Cline has often been called one of the most influential vocalists of all time, and cover artist Liz Ruffner will perform your favorite classic Cline hits, including “Crazy,” “I Fall To Pieces,” and more. This popular concert sells out nearly every year, so get your tickets while they last! Don’t miss your chance to witness an amazing tribute to one of music’s all-time greatest stars. This event will have a cash bar, and guests are welcome to bring their own snacks and other food. We also encourage you to bring your own lawn chairs, as patio seating is limited. You won’t want to miss this one-of-a-kind event!
June 13, 2018

Women fight for their rights – and their fashions?

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 […]
June 13, 2018

Washington County – a go-to vacation destination

Very few things have captured the hearts of modern Americans in the same way as the iconic vacation trip. We obsess over our vacation time and agonize over every detail of the trip. Where to go? Where to stay? What to do? The prospect of a literal escape from daily life offers a mental escape for many. As a result, the American travel industry is worth over a trillion dollars, and Washington County is just one of many American locations which benefits from the popularity of cultural tourism. But it may surprise many to learn that Washington County has been the vacation destination of choice of many for over 200 years. The idea of the modern vacation begins, like so many other trends, with the European aristocracy. As many larger cities developed, they unfortunately did so without an eye towards public health, sanitation, or even basic sewage containment. By England’s Elizabethan Era, the average London city street contained a several foot-thick morass of dirt, dust, mud, human and animal waste, garbage, butcher’s offal, and chemical runoff from any neighborhood businesses (including tanneries, which utilized sheep’s urine to process animal hides). The street muck only worsened as the Industrial Revolution led […]