One of the oldest structures on any Veterans Administration campus, the stone mill fronts the Susquehanna River.

The home of slaveholder John Stump in Perryville, Md., has gracefully weathered the years. Stump was forced to flee when the town became a Union staging area.

As in centuries past, sailboats of all kinds ply the Susquehanna Flats, just downriver from Perryville.

Perryville has a view across the Susquehanna River of Havre de Grace, Md., once under threat by Southern sympathizers. Perryville was home to the Civil War Mule School.

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Civil War Mule School made Perryville, Md., a bustling place in the early 1860s. By Reed Hellman

Date published: 7/19/2008

THOUGH THE FIRST shots in the War Between the States pounded Charleston's Fort Sumter, the actual first blood was drawn on the streets of Baltimore. Along Maryland's Eastern Shore, throughout the state's southern counties and west into the piedmont, secessionist sentiment ruled the countryside. Washington, the Union capital, stood stranded, sandwiched between breakaway Virginia and a largely hostile swath of central Maryland.

Homegrown rebel militia burned bridges and disrupted rail and highway traffic north from Baltimore to the Susquehanna River near Pennsylvania, fraying the cords connecting Washington to the rest of the Union. In the war's first few months, an innocuous little river port on the Susquehanna's north shore, Perryville, suddenly became the key to protecting the Union capital and prosecuting the war.

Perryville, in Maryland's Cecil County (a three-hour drive from Fredericksburg), was the halfway point on the Wilmington-to-Baltimore railroad, and, shielded by the river, was the last railhead secure against Southern sympathizers and raiders. No railroad bridges spanned the Susquehanna, which broadened into the head of the Chesapeake Bay immediately downstream from the town. Specially constructed ferries shuttled the rail cars across.

Unlike much of central Maryland, Cecil County favored the Union cause. Nearly 24,000 people lived in Cecil. Roughly 20,000 were white, 3,000 were free blacks and fewer than 1,000 were slaves. In the 1860 elections, John Bell, the Constitutional Union Party candidate, carried the county by a slim margin even though John C. Breckinridge, a Southern Democrat, took the state.

'CECIL Will Not Secede'

"Let Maryland do what she will, Cecil County will not secede." A resolution passed by Cecil Countians stated the prevailing sentiment as local volunteers guarded rail lines, hoisted Union flags and established Fort Dare in Perryville.

On April 28, The New York Times wrote: "Places are like people. Some are great by natural advantage. Some achieve greatness by the aid of capitalists. And others have greatness thrust upon them. The present site of Camp Dare [Perryville] belongs to the latter category. This makes Perryville a center of notoriety."

Date published: 7/19/2008