The History of Point of Rocks, Maryland

Where the River Bends

Point of Rocks takes its name from the geography that made it: a rocky promontory in western Frederick County where the Potomac River, running down out of the Alleghenies, is forced hard against the eastern wall of the Catoctin Mountains and turns sharply east. The bend narrows the valley to little more than a quarter mile, and for as long as people have moved through this stretch of Maryland, they have been squeezed through it — first as a Native American portage and ferry crossing, later as the corridor for a canal, a railroad, an iron bridge, and eventually a federal highway, all threaded through the same narrow gap between mountain and river. Point of Rocks has never been a large place. It has always been a necessary one.

Canal and Rail at the Narrows

The nineteenth century arrived at Point of Rocks in the form of two great rival public works: the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, hugging the Maryland bank of the Potomac, and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, laying its roadbed at the very foot of the cliffs. Both companies broke ground on the same day, July 4, 1828, and their competing claims to the same narrow right-of-way at Point of Rocks touched off a legal contest that ran four years through the Maryland courts, which ruled in the canal's favor in 1832. The resulting compromise let the railroad build alongside the canal rather than displace it, sharing the narrow ground between Point of Rocks and Harpers Ferry. The two works were eventually built side by side, canal and rail running within feet of one another beneath the rock face — a compromise etched permanently into the landscape. An iron bridge across the Potomac followed in 1849, replacing the old ferry and linking Maryland to the Virginia shore. Marble quarried from the ridges above town went out by canal boat and rail to help build the columns of the United States Capitol.

A Village Divided by War

That same narrowness made Point of Rocks a place of military consequence during the Civil War. The river crossing, the canal, and the rail line were all strategic assets — for the Union, a supply and communication corridor into western Maryland and the Shenandoah Valley; for the Confederacy, a vulnerability worth striking. The village saw repeated military action through the war: Stonewall Jackson raided B&O rolling stock here in 1861, the same year a skirmish drew in the 28th Pennsylvania under Col. John White Geary; in September 1862, D. H. Hill’s division crossed the Potomac nearby as part of the Antietam campaign; Confederate cavalry captured a B&O train at the crossing on June 17, 1863; and in 1864, Mosby’s 43rd Battalion Virginia Cavalry struck the town in what became known as the Calico Raid. Union troops maintained a presence in the area for long stretches of the war to protect the B&O’s vital western line, and the crossing remained a point of anxiety for Frederick County residents through much of the conflict.

The Gothic Station of 1873

The Point of Rocks that would one day charter a Masonic lodge was, by the 1870s, a genuine railroad town — the western terminus of the B&O's Washington Branch, where trains from the capital stopped to change engines and crews. The depot that still stands today was designed in 1873 by E. Francis Baldwin, the B&O's own architect: a Victorian Gothic station of local stone and elaborate wooden trim, unlike any other stop on the line, its steep gables and ornamented porches marking the junction as something more than a routine stop. The station remains in active use for MARC commuter rail today and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a rare survivor of the railroad culture that built the town around it.

Eleven Men and a Charter

It was into this world of conductors, brakemen, canal boatmen, quarrymen, and merchants that Freemasonry arrived at Point of Rocks. The nearest lodges — Brunswick No. 191 to the west, Columbia No. 58 in Frederick city to the east — were a long and inconvenient journey for men who kept a railroad man's hours. In the spring of 1898, eleven of these men resolved to change that, petitioning the Grand Lodge of Maryland for a charter of their own. On May 10, 1898, that petition was granted, and Fervency Lodge No. 200, A.F. & A.M., began its work beneath the same cliffs where the canal and the railroad had settled their old quarrel seventy years before. Read the full chartering story of Fervency Lodge No. 200.

The Point Today

Much of what made Point of Rocks matter in the nineteenth century has quieted. The canal closed to commercial traffic in 1924. The great B&O yards are gone. But the station still stands, the river still bends the same way it always has, and Fervency Lodge No. 200 still meets a short walk from where its charter members once worked the rails and the river trade. Learn how to join Fervency Lodge, or visit the lodge homepage to see what remains of the village where, in the words of one nineteenth-century traveler, "everything meets."