Worthington Farm: the Monocacy field where Early lost a day

The landscape of Worthington Farm. NPS.

Three miles south of Frederick, Maryland, on the south bank of the Monocacy River, Worthington Farm — first called Clifton — is a stretch of rolling fields and woods that still looks much as it did on July 9, 1864, when the Battle of Monocacy was fought across it. It is part of Monocacy National Battlefield, and its story runs from a 1724 land patent through slavery, a distillery partnership and a battle to a dairy tenancy and, finally, a national park.

From land grant to Clifton

Native Americans lived along the Monocacy long before Europeans; the battlefield holds eleven known prehistoric sites, from the early Archaic to the late Woodland periods. In the 1700s speculators and settlers mapped, patented and cleared the land. Most of what became the farm was part of a 1,400-acre grant called "Wett Work", its tracts tied to the point where the Georgetown Pike crossed the river — and later to Monocacy Junction on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

The main house. NPS.

A working farm, and who worked it

When Worthington bought it, the farm was already productive: about 300 acres, 276 of them improved, with cows, horses, pigs and oxen; winter wheat, flint corn, hay and butter; fruit trees in the yard and an orchard and kitchen garden south of the house. That work was done by enslaved people and, later, tenant farmers.

Frederick County held fewer enslaved people than most of Maryland, and some Black families had members freed while others were still enslaved nearby. In 1840, under Griffin Taylor, seventeen enslaved people lived and worked at Clifton; by 1850 the number had fallen sharply across the Monocacy area. Two small one-and-a-half-storey buildings near the south end of the house probably housed the people Worthington still enslaved.

The farm in the early 1900s: the house among barns, outbuildings, fences and open fields. NPS / Monocacy National Battlefield Archives.

The battle

The road and railroad crossing that made the land valuable also made it a target for both armies throughout the war. In July 1864 Confederate General Jubal Early, having driven Union General David Hunter out of the northern Shenandoah Valley, marched into Maryland with the road to Washington open before him, and met a Union force at Monocacy Junction.

On July 9 Confederate cavalry under General John McCausland forded the Monocacy at the Worthington–McKinney ford, just downstream of the covered bridge. Climbing from the river, they were slowed by fences and fields of freshly stacked grain, and met Union soldiers sheltered behind the fence line between the Worthington and Thomas farms. The fighting surged back and forth between the two houses for control of the Georgetown Pike.

The view between the Worthington and Thomas farms mattered in the battle; trees along Interstate 270 now block much of it. NPS / Monocacy National Battlefield Archives.

The Worthingtons hid in their basement while it went on. The house and farm were badly damaged; dead from both sides were buried on the property for a time, and the house served as a field hospital. The battle was a Union defeat, but a useful one: Early lost heavily and a day, his men were exhausted, and he could not take Washington.

Tenants, a park, and neglect

A tenant farmer and his horse, about 1935. The house had no central heating and no plumbing beyond one pipe bringing water from the cistern to the kitchen. NPS.

• After the war the family rebuilt the fences and the farm prospered again. John Worthington stopped farming by the 1890s and the house took boarders.
• 1905 — on his death his sons Glenn and Clarke let the farm and house to tenants; a dairy barn followed, as dairying spread through the region.
• 1928 — the Monocacy Battlefield Memorial Association, including Glenn Worthington, who had been six at the time of the battle, asked Congress for a park. Congress authorised Monocacy National Military Park in 1934; it became Monocacy National Battlefield in 1976.
• 1953 — the family sold to Jenkins Brothers, Inc., a corporate farm whose mostly migrant workers lived in the house during the growing season. The house decayed, the outbuildings fell down, and trees spread along the field edges and over the old garden and orchard. An interstate built in the 1950s cut the farm off from the Thomas Farm.
• 1982 — the Park Service bought the farm, stabilised the house and cleared the trees around it.

What is there now

• Boundaries: a bend of the Monocacy on the north and west, the crest of Brooks Hill on the east; 280 acres.
• The house: the only building standing from the battle, with painted interior decoration attributed to Constantino Brumidi, the artist of the U.S. Capitol's frescoes.
• Old roads: traces probably linked to the 1700s river fords.
• Fences and hedges: post-and-rail, picket and paling fences once marked the yards and fields; a line of mature Osage orange trees still outlines the road trace and the old kitchen garden.
• Two white oaks at the northwest foot of Brooks Hill stand either side of what was probably a path to a small two-room house, now only a stone foundation. They may have been planted in the 1800s, and may belong to the history of the farm's African American community.

Part of the 2013 existing-conditions site plan. NPS.

Sources

Written from "Worthington Farm (Clifton) Cultural Landscape", National Park Service Cultural Landscapes Inventory, a work of the United States government in the public domain; enslavement figures from Paula Stoner Reed, Monocacy National Battlefield: Cultural Resources Study (National Park Service, 1999).