Engagement at Westminster

Engagement at Westminster. War at the Almshouse. , On June 29, 1863, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s infantry was in Pennsylvania, and Gen. J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry arrived here on the outskirts of Westminster. Gen. Fitzhugh Lee’s division led the column, which numbered 6,000 including cavalrymen and two horse artillery batteries. Prisoners captured at the blacksmith shop on Main Street told Lee that a small Union cavalry force occupied the town. Anticipating little resistance, he deployed skirmishers and sent the 3rd Virginia Cavalry and an artillery piece across the almshouse fields here. Before the troopers could get into position on Main Street near the railroad, however, Capt. Charles Corbit’s Co. C and part of Co. D, 1st Delaware Cavalry, charged the Confederates near here on Washington Road. After sharp skirmishing, Stuart occupied Westminster., A few days afterward, during the Battle of Gettysburg, a massive Union supply-wagon park filled the almshouse fields behind Green Street. Civilian Philip Fisher later wrote, “For a week, every hill and dale was covered with wagons in number perhaps five thousand. From seven to eight times as many mules and horses filled every pasture and meadow as far as the eye can reach from the Court House steeple.”, The almshouse, founded in 1852, served as the county home for the poor, disabled, and unwanted until the 1960s. The Carroll County Farm Museum was established here in 1965.