On June 29, 1863, as Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s infantry was in Pennsylvania, Gen. J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry reached the outskirts of Westminster with Gen. Fitzhugh Lee’s division leading a 6,000-man column that included cavalrymen and two horse artillery batteries. Prisoners captured at the blacksmith shop on Main Street told Fitzhugh Lee that a small Union cavalry force occupied the town, and expecting little resistance, he deployed skirmishers and sent the 3rd Virginia Cavalry and an artillery piece across the almshouse fields toward Main Street near the railroad. Before they could get into position, Capt. Charles Corbit’s Co. C and part of Co. D, 1st Delaware Cavalry, charged the Confederates near Washington Road. After sharp skirmishing, Stuart occupied Westminster. A few days later, during the Battle of Gettysburg, a massive Union supply-wagon park filled the almshouse fields behind Green Street. Civilian Philip Fisher later wrote, “For a week, every hill and dale was covered with wagons in number perhaps five thousand. From seven to eight times as many mules and horses filled every pasture and meadow as far as the eye can reach from the Court House steeple.” The almshouse, founded in 1852, served as the county home for the poor, disabled, and unwanted until the 1960s, and the Carroll County Farm Museum was established there in 1965.