Hagerstown, Maryland: The Town That Was Elizabeth's First

For more than 50 years, Hagerstown, Maryland, was officially Elizabeth Town, named by founder Jonathan Hager for his wife. People called it after him anyway. In 1814 the legislature made the husband’s name the legal one.

Captain Hager’s swamp

Jonathan Hager laid out the town in 1762, according to J. Thomas Scharf’s 1882 History of Western Maryland, on a site “said to have been in the main a dreary, uneven swamp.” Hager had come from Germany around 1730 and settled about two miles west, on a tract called “Hager’s Delight.” The U.S. Geological Survey’s 1905 book of place-name origins, by Henry Gannett, keeps it short: the city is “named for a German, Jonathan Hager, one of the original proprietors.”

He married Elizabeth about 1740. Scharf gives her name as Elizabeth Kershner; a page from Hager’s family Bible, which Scharf prints in translation, spells it Grischner. “The elder Jonathan Hager named the new village Elizabeth Town in honor of his wife, Elizabeth,” Scharf writes. She didn’t get long to enjoy it. The Bible entry says she died on April 16, 1765, three years after the town was laid out.

Elizabeth (Hager’s) Town

What happened next is why you know the place as Hagerstown. In Scharf’s words, the name “came to be written Elizabeth (Hager’s) Town, and gradually the Elizabeth was discarded and it was denominated solely Hagerstown.”

The official records held on to Elizabeth for decades, though, and you can see it in two moments. When Maryland’s legislature incorporated the town in 1791, it was still Elizabeth Town. And when George Washington rode in on October 20, 1790, and sat down to a supper with the town’s leading men, the toast he proposed was “Prosperity to the inhabitants of Elizabeth-Town.”

The 1814 switch

The paperwork finally caught up on January 26, 1814. That day the legislature passed an act “to alter and change the name of Elizabeth Town, in Washington County, to Hager’s Town, and to incorporate the same.” From then on, the husband’s name was the legal one.

Hager himself never saw the switch. He was killed at a sawmill on November 6, 1775, when a big piece of timber rolled onto him; the wood was being cut for the German Reformed church he’d been helping to build. He’d been elected to the Maryland assembly in 1773, Scharf notes, but the House declared him ineligible because he was a naturalized German rather than a native British subject. The family kept pushing for the town anyway. When Washington County was carved out of Frederick County in 1776, an old account says Mr. Hager “rode down to Annapolis and had his town made the county town.” Scharf figures that must have been the son, Jonathan Hager Jr., since the father was dead by then. So the town became the county seat while its legal name was still Elizabeth’s.

Sources & further reading

• J. Thomas Scharf, History of Western Maryland, vol. 2 (1882). The town laid out in 1762, the swamp, Hager’s arrival from Germany and “Hager’s Delight” (p. 1059); his marriage, the family Bible entry, “named the new village Elizabeth Town in honor of his wife,” the slow change to Hagerstown, the county seat in 1776, the 1773 election dispute, his death in 1775 and the 1791 incorporation of Elizabeth Town (p. 1060); the act of January 26, 1814 (p. 1065); Washington’s toast of 1790 (p. 1068).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 146. “Named for a German, Jonathan Hager, one of the original proprietors.”
• GNIS feature 598385 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Hagerstown: established 1762.