Funkstown’s Link to the Chesapeake

When the National Road was completed through Funkstown in 1823, a rush of “stagecoaches and wagon teams, droves of cattle, teamsters and travelers” flooded through the town. Although Baltimore was seventy miles to the east, the Funkstown city founders named their main street “Baltimore,” pointing out their role as a link between the shores of the Chesapeake, the Great Valley of Virgnia and the mountains to the west.

Originally named “Jerusalem” by German immigrant Jacob Funck in 1767, Funkstown competed for the Washington County seat but lost to neighboring Hagerstown. Surviving taverns, inns and store buildings along Baltimore Street hold memories of the early travelers going west along the National Road—“such a rush and roar of movement as this country will never see again.” One old resident recalled the busy road as having “the animation of a Perpetual Fair.”

(Sidebar Poem):

Nick Hammer sat in Funkstown

Before his tavern door —

The same old bluestone tavern

The wagoners knew of yore,

When the Conestoga Schooners

Came staggering under their load

And the lines of slow pack horses

Stamped over the National Road

—George Alfred Townsend, American novelist and poet, 1880.

Marker is on Baltimore Street (Alternate U.S. 40), on the right when traveling west.

Courtesy hmdb.org

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