The Berkeley Hotel is one of the last surviving antebellum buildings in the area. It was constructed shortly after the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad reached Martinsburg in 1842. The adjacent railroad yards were twice the target of Confederate Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, as possession of Martinsburg, a strategic railroad center, was hotly contested during the early years of the war. On May 24, 1861, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston ordered Jackson to destroy the rolling stock there, and beginning in June, over the next ten months, more than 400 cars and 40 locomotives were taken, damaged, or destroyed. Confederates also stripped the roundhouse complex of its stationary equipment, tools, and 40-foot turntable but did not destroy the buildings. A few locomotives were disassembled, and 40-horse teams dragged them up the turnpikes to Strasburg; several were transported in pieces to Richmond, reassembled, and returned to use. In September-October 1862, after the Battle of Antietam at Sharpsburg, Maryland, Jackson’s retreating column occupied Martinsburg. The Confederates destroyed almost 38 miles of track and burned the roundhouse, shops, warehouses, ticket and telegraph offices, company hotel, and other facilities, but the privately owned Berkeley Hotel was spared. The Baltimore and Ohio bought the building in 1866, expanded it, and used it as the station, eating house, telegraph office, and hotel. In 1877 trainmen and enginemen there struck to protest wage cuts, starting the Great Strike of 1877 nationwide, and railroad and military officials suppressed the strike there using the building as headquarters.
