During the Civil War, the Union and Confederate armies each used the Frederick County Courthouse as a hospital and a prison. After the First Battle of Kernstown on March 23, 1862, local citizen Cornelia McDonald nursed the wounded here and recalled the porch strewn with dead men as others dying inside made room for more casualties. Sgt. Henry Peck was among 63 soldiers of the 118th Pennsylvania Infantry captured at the Battle of Shepherdstown on September 20, 1862, and briefly imprisoned here, where he remembered a crowd of about 300 rebels, stragglers, conscripts, and other prisoners in and around the building. The Greek Revival-style courthouse, designed by Baltimore architect Robert Cary Long, Jr., was completed in 1840 as the third courthouse on this site, where the first courthouse in 1758 was also the place of George Washington’s first election to office as a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses.
