03/22/2026
Stand on the Williamsport side of the Potomac River and look southwest toward West Virginia. That ridge across the water is the Maryland side of Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. One of the most visited historical sites on the East Coast. There's a strong argument it exists because of a woman named Mary Mish, who lived right across that river and refused to let it be forgotten. Most people have never heard her name. That's exactly the problem we're here to fix. Mary Mish lived at Maidstone-on-the-Potomac, an estate on the West Virginia side of the Potomac River directly across from Williamsport. She was not on the margins of this valley's cultural and historical life, she was at the center of it, in ways that history has been content to quietly overlook.
In 1942, she became the first female president of the Washington County Historical Society, serving in that role until 1949. Under her leadership, the Society didn't just preserve documents and artifacts. It preserved places. She led the campaign to acquire and fully restore Hager House, one of the oldest surviving structures in Hagerstown, built by the city's founder Jonathan Hager around 1740, and presented it as a gift to the City of Hagerstown in 1954. She was instrumental in saving Fort Frederick from serious structural deterioration and began planning for its bicentennial celebration. She understood that history isn't just something you catalog. It's something you fight for.
But Harpers Ferry was her defining fight, and it almost didn't happen at all.
Congress authorized Harpers Ferry National Monument in 1944. The authorization was essentially symbolic, it came with no dedicated funding and no mechanism for land acquisition. The federal government had said this place matters and then done nothing about it for years. The site sat there, authorized but unprotected, deteriorating. Mary Mish started making calls.
She met Dr. Henry McDonald, former mayor of Harpers Ferry and president of the Harpers Ferry National Monument Association, at the 1946 rededication of Washington Monument near Boonsboro. McDonald laid out the problem clearly: Congress had authorized the monument but West Virginia wasn't moving on land acquisition, and the Maryland side of the river, which was critical to the park's full scope, had no plan at all.
Mary Mish came home from that meeting and went to work. She lobbied the Maryland governor. She worked contacts at the Department of Forests and Parks. She tracked down and secured the first $40,000 in Maryland state funds for land acquisition in 1952 — extracted from a budget that had not been earmarked for this purpose. She fought for an additional $25,000 appropriation in 1956. She coordinated with state officials so skillfully that Maryland acquired every parcel of its Harpers Ferry land without a single condemnation proceeding. Not one landowner had to be taken to court.
In 1961, she was appointed as a founding trustee of the Maryland Historical Trust. In 1962, she received the first-ever Maryland Heritage Award from the Maryland Historical Society, the inaugural recipient of what remains one of the state's most prestigious preservation honors. She died in 1968 at the age of 63.
Congressman Charles McC. Mathias Jr. stood on the House floor to honor her. He called her "a woman of lively intelligence, tremendous energy, and deep commitment to the future of the Potomac Valley."
The Potomac Valley he was describing is this one. The river you can see from the end of our streets. Hager House still stands. Fort Frederick State Park still operates. Harpers Ferry National Historical Park welcomes visitors from around the world every year.
Mary Mish's name appears on almost none of it. We're saying it today. She was practically a neighbor. 🏛️
