Shepherdstown began with Thomas Shepherd’s 1734 land grant on the south side of the Potomac River near Pack Horse Ford, was chartered as Mecklenburg in 1762 for Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, wife of King George III, and was renamed Shepherd’s Town in 1798 to honor its founder. Thomas Swearingen established a ferry here in 1755, and in 1775 one hundred riflemen from Shepherdstown and the surrounding area answered Gen. George Washington’s call with a “Beeline March” to Massachusetts, traveling six hundred miles in twenty-four days. In the 1790s, the first newspaper and book in what would become West Virginia were published here, and the first West Virginia post office opened here in 1792. During the Civil War, both Union and Confederate troops occupied the town, and in 1862, after the Battle of Antietam a few miles away, the town cared for several thousand wounded Confederate soldiers. Shepherd College was incorporated here in 1871 and joined the State Normal School system in 1872 in what is now McMurran Hall, while in 1866 the first Freedmen’s school for young black citizens opened at the southeast corner of Church and High Streets. In 1926 the town library opened in the former market, jail, and fire house, and in 2000 Shepherdstown hosted the Syrian-Israeli peace talks. The Historic Shepherdstown Museum, opened in 1983 in the old Entler Hotel buildings dating to the late eighteenth century, preserves local furniture, clocks, silver and copper artifacts, a circa 1840 hotel room, and exhibits on Civil War Shepherdstown and early Shenandoah Valley arts and crafts.
