After the railroad reached Ridgely in 1867, James K. Saulsbury built one of the town’s earliest residences there that same year, combining a large store for a widely known general merchandise business with an adjoining spacious home. In 1930, Dr. Jesse Showalter Fifer, after serving his internship at Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore and answering a newspaper advertisement from the Eastern Shore, chose Ridgely to begin his medical practice. He married Mary Fries Ringgold, the mayor’s daughter, in 1933 and planned to establish a hospital in Ridgely. On July 14, 1934, he had recently purchased the Saulsbury homestead to use both as a residence and as a hospital for minor surgery cases, and within months the hospital was operating. By June 1935, extensive improvements were being made to the local hospital, then the only medical institution in Caroline County, to handle increasing numbers of patients from nearby Maryland and Delaware counties. Between August 1934 and December 1943, women from about 40 communities across the central Eastern Shore, from Kent Island south to Cambridge, north through Caroline County, and into Delaware as far as Dover, came to Ridgely to give birth. In January 1941, the hospital reported 58 tonsillectomies and 90 births during 1940, and in August 1942 it reported that the 500th baby had been born there since it opened in 1934. Dr. J.S. Fifer then announced that his maternity hospital would close at the end of 1943, with no more maternity patients accepted after December 15, because of changing conditions, added responsibilities, and difficulties. Other doctors later kept practices in the house, but it no longer served as a hospital. In 1998, the Commissioners of Ridgely bought the building and moved Town Hall into Ridgely House after its intervening use as a six-apartment rental building.