Monocacy, Maryland

Monocacy is an abandoned village in Frederick County, Maryland. It is believed to have been located nearby present day Creagerstown, but has never been precisely located. There are signs of the towns existence going back as far as 1730.

German settlers arrived in Frederick County in 1729. The first settlement created by settlers in Frederick was Monocacy, which was founded between 1725 and 1730, making it the oldest settlement in Western Maryland. The town was settled nearby the Monocacy Trail, an old Indian trail that ran along the Monocacy River. In 1730 the Monocacy Trail was made into a wagon road. In its early days, Monocacy was the main settlement in the area. This position was eventually taken by Fredericktown.

Between 1732 and 1734 a church known as "the Log church" was built in Monocacy.Moravian missionaries visited the area regularly and many of the people of "Manakasy," as the Moravians spelled it in their records, often visited the Moravian Settlements in nearby Pennsylvania.

By the time the log church was built the village was somewhat important to the area. The town had a number of taverns and other places to sleep. "As late as 1747 it possessed accommodations better than those of Frederick."

Sometime between 1760 and 1770 the town of Creagerstown supplanted Monocacy.

By 1808 Monocacy road was macadamized.

As early as 1896 knowledge of the location of the town had been lost. In 1896, Rev. George A. Whitmore, a resident of Thurmont, wrote upon interviewing two residents of Creagerstown who were in "bordering on 80 years" about the location of the Log Church, he had been told that Creagerstown was built on the old location of the church. Whitmore mentions that one of the people he interviewed, Mr. W. L. Grimes Sr., actually helped tear down the Log church so that the new church could be built in its place.

Whitmore goes on to say that traditional lore states though that the town of Monocacy is located to the southeast of Creagerstown at the intersection of Monocacy Road and Poe's Ford nearby Hunting Creek. Both Whitmore and his contemporary Mr. Schultz investigated the site and found flat land with a few dwellings. In a History of Frederick County, Mr. Schultz is quoted as saying that the location to the southeast of Creagerstown "agrees in every particular with the data that we have heretofore been able to obtain and I therefore believe that the few old houses and the graveyard are all perhaps that remain of the ancient village of Monocacy."

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