Civil War Split Howard County

Thursday marked 150 years since Union and Confederate troops touched off the first major battle of the Civil War in the Battle of Bull Run, near Manassas, VA.

In a war that famously separated brothers and families, Howard County represented a microcosm of the young nation. With a “high population" of Confederate-leaning residents, men left their families and homes in Maryland to fight for the South, according to documents and researchers at the Howard County Historical Society.

“When the war started, the county was very much a southern sympathizing area,” said Lauren McCormack, executive director of the Howard County Historical Society.

“Ten days after Fort Sumter, Clarksville residents held a secession rally,” McCormack added.

Although Maryland never seceded from the Union, many people from Howard County and the Baltimore region enlisted in the Confederate Virginia Cavalry. It wasn’t until late 1862 that Confederate cavalries sprouted around Maryland.

According to McCormack, Howard County—which had relatively few tobacco plantations compared with southern and eastern parts of Maryland—was still home to nearly 3,000 slaves and fewer than 2,000 free black residents one year before the war.

“I think that was a large reason why they were sympathetic to the south,” McCormack said.

One of the most important events took place when a southern inventor from Baltimore named Ross Winans sent his steam gun prototype to the Confederate Army by rail. Union soldiers recovered this precursor to the machine gun when Union Gen. Benjamin Butler and his men intercepted the delivery at a rail station near Ellicott City; , near a historical marker on Old Washington Road.