The Clarysville Inn and a surrounding complex of buildings became a United States general hospital during the Civil War after U.S. soldiers commandeered the inn on March 6, 1862, and began bringing in sick and wounded comrades who had been crowded into filthy, badly lit, and poorly ventilated buildings in Cumberland. After wards and other structures were built, the hospital complex provided medical care to thousands of Union soldiers as well as some Confederates, with each ward arranged in two rows of iron cots separated by a central aisle. Patients who died and were not taken home for burial were buried in a nearby cemetery. After the war, the temporary hospital buildings were demolished and sold along with the iron bedsteads, the inn was returned to its owner, and Union dead buried there and in the cemetery in Cumberland were disinterred and reburied at Antietam National Cemetery. The old inn, which had been the nucleus of the Civil War hospital complex, burned 134 years later on March 10, 1999. The stone bridge at the site was built when the National Pike was completed from Cumberland to Illinois, and this major highway, used by pioneers moving west, passed in front of the hospital.
