Clarysville General Hospital
Center for Healing
The Clarysville Inn once stood in front of you to the right. In this tavern, and in a complex of buildings constructed around it, the United States established a general hospital during the Civil War. On March 6, 1862, U.S. soldiers commandeered the inn and began to fill it with their sick an wounded comrades who had been crowded into filthy, badly lit, and poorly ventilated buildings in Cumberland. Following the construction of wards and other structures, this hospital complex provided medical care to thousands of Union soldiers as well as some Confederates. Each ward had two rows of iron cots with an aisle down the center.
Patients who died and were not taken home for burial were interred in a nearby cemetery. After the war, the temporary hospital structures were demolished and sold along with the iron bedsteads, and the inn was returned to its owner. The union dead buried here and in the cemetery in Cumberland were disinterred and reburied at Antietam National Cemetery. Sadly, the old inn, which had served as the nucleus of the Civil War hospital complex, burned 134 years later on March 10, 1999.
The stone bridge here was constructed when the National Pike was completed from Cumberland to Illinois. This important highway was the principal route taken by pioneers moving west and passed in front of Clarysville General Hospital.
Marker is at the intersection of Clarysville Road SW and Vale Summit Road (Maryland Route 55), on the right when traveling south on Clarysville Road SW.
Courtesy hmdb.org
