Main Street Williamsport

08/13/2026

It’s that time of year again for Celebration of Trees. Email inquiries only to reserve your tree. Contact is in the original post below.

Planning is underway for The Celebration of Trees 2026. If you are interested in putting up a tree this year please reach out via email at [email protected]. We will not be responding to social media inquiries about putting up a tree. You must reach out to us at the email listed above.

08/13/2026

Happy first anniversary Williamsport Diner LLC

🎉 Williamsport Diner is turning ONE! 🎉

Join us this Saturday the 15th as we celebrate our 1-Year Anniversary! Thank you to everyone who has supported us throughout our first year.

Stop by from 9 AM–2 PM and enjoy FREE coffee and a FREE cupcake while supplies last. We can’t wait to celebrate with our amazing customers and community!

07/31/2026

In the fall of 1959, Williamsport voters went to the polls and decided this town needed a community pool. Not a developer, not a grant, a town vote. The construction bid went to Norman S. Early & Son for just over $86,000.
The dedication was Saturday, June 2, 1960. Over 1,000 people showed up, more than half the town's population at the time. The Williamsport High School Blue Band played under director Harry Kight. The Boy Scouts and members of Williamsport American Legion Post #202 raised the flag. There was even a "Queen of the Pool" contest, and Susie Downs of South Artizan Street took the crown that day.
The L. Beard Miller Memorial Pool - williamsport pool was later renamed in honor of L. Beard Miller, the former mayor who pushed to get it built in the first place. His name is still on it.
It sits inside Byron Memorial Park, the same park that's home to Conococheague Little League, the Community Building, and the Williamsport Memorial Library, Washington County Free Library, MD, right in the middle of everything this town does for its kids.
The Town put it through a full rehabilitation not long ago, tearing out and rebuilding the walls, floor, and coping, because a 60-plus year old pool needed real work to keep going. Williamsport didn't just build this thing in 1960 and forget it. The town has kept paying to keep it open, generation after generation.
Every kid cooling off in that water this week is standing in a pool this town voted for, built, named after the mayor who fought for it, and has been rebuilding and maintaining ever since.
That's not nostalgia. That's a town that decided this mattered enough to keep paying for it.

07/30/2026

In 1880, William DeFrehn opened a chair factory on the berm side of the canal, right above the Conococheague Aqueduct. At full production, they were turning out 125 dozen chairs a month, 1,500 chairs, in 35 different styles. That's real industry, running on water rents paid straight to the canal company to power the machines.
Then came 1889. The flood that hit Williamsport that year took out a serious stretch of the canal itself, and by the historical association's own account, DeFrehn's factory was the single largest casualty of the whole disaster.
The math didn't work to rebuild. So DeFrehn packed up and moved the entire operation to Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Later, it moved again, to Hornerstown.
The site didn't stay forgotten, though. In August of 1956, two archaeologists from Frederick, Nicholas Yinger and Ralph Fout, came out and actually excavated the old factory grounds at the mouth of the Conococheague, more than 60 years after the flood that ended it.
A factory that made 1,500 chairs a month, wiped out in a single flood, packed up and gone within the year, and still worth digging up half a century later.
That's how much this water has shaped what did and didn't survive here.

07/29/2026

Before the bridge, there was a ferry, and this story starts earlier than almost anything else we've told you this month.
The first ferry crossing here dates to around 1731, run by a man named John Williams along the old Great Waggon Road. A few years later, Evan Watkins took over a crossing nearby, licensed by the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1744. His landing wasn't just a river crossing, it was the entrance to Braddock's Road, and in 1755, Washington and Braddock's forces crossed the Potomac right here on their way to Fort Duquesne. Before Williamsport had a name, this exact ground was already on the map of American history.
It wasn't always peaceful, either. In 1756, an officer serving under Washington was killed in a tavern fight on the Maryland side, after soldiers stationed across the river kept slipping over to drink. Washington was reportedly furious about it.
Ownership passed to Peter Light in 1795, then to Robert Lemen in 1854, who finally rigged a cable across the river so the crossing didn't depend on current and luck. In 1870, Lemen's daughter Eliza married Charles Ardinger of Williamsport, and the family ran the ferry from there.
Charles died in 1900. Eliza kept the ferry running by herself for eight more years, a widow operating a river crossing alone, until the new bridge opened in 1908 and put her out of business for good. She sued the bridge company for the income she lost. She died before the case ever made it to court.
Here's the part you can still see for yourself. On the West Virginia side, there's a marker for Watkins' Ferry, put up in 1967, standing in a small cluster with markers for the Gettysburg Campaign, Cushwa Basin, and the C&O Canal Aqueduct, all within easy walking distance of each other. On the Maryland side, the actual crossing point is now River Bottom Park.
Almost 180 years, several families, one crossing point that carried colonial travelers, Revolutionary War soldiers, Civil War armies, and everyday Williamsport residents back and forth across this river, long before a single car ever drove over it.
Next time you're at River Bottom Park, you're standing where this whole town used to cross.

07/29/2026

Be sure to wish Devin a Happy Birthday today!

07/28/2026

Heads up

07/28/2026

1896. You could catch a trolley in Williamsport and ride it straight to Hagerstown. First trolley line in the entire county, and it started right here.
It ran on power from a steam generating station using water pulled from the Conococheague Creek, the same water that made this spot the right one for the job. Within a year the line was already too popular for its own infrastructure. More riders meant more cars, more cars meant more power than the original station could handle, so a bigger plant went up in Hagerstown in 1897 to keep pace.
The trolley ran for 51 years. On August 4, 1947, car number 172 made the last run into Williamsport, conductor Perry Dodson at the front.
Here's the part most people miss. The trolley barn is still standing, right across the parking lot from the Cushwa Building. Walk in today and you'll find historic photos, old toys, children's costumes from another era, a scale model of a canal boat's mule stable, and dioramas that bring the whole thing back to life.
The trolley stopped running almost 80 years ago. The building that powered it is still telling the story, a few steps from where the canal boats used to turn around.
You've probably parked next to a piece of Williamsport history and never known it.

07/27/2026

Everyone knows Doubleday Hill. Almost nobody knows the whole story.
In 1861, Union Captain Abner Doubleday mounted three siege guns on the cemetery hill overlooking the Potomac, guarding the river crossing at the very start of the Civil War. In 1897, the town held a massive dedication ceremony for the site, seven to ten thousand people showed up, complete with a mock battle in original Civil War uniforms. The real cannons weren't even installed until 1899, and didn't get a proper mount until a second dedication in 1901.
Here's the part almost nobody knows. Around the year 2000, a cannon collector offered the town money for the original tubes. That's when Williamsport realized what it actually had sitting out in the weather for a century. The real cannons came off the hill and went into the basement of Town Hall for safekeeping. Plastic replicas took their place.
They stayed there for over a decade, until 2012, when the town landed a $23,000 Maryland Heritage Areas Authority grant to bring them back properly. The tubes got shipped to a foundry in Ashland, Kentucky, refinished, and mounted on brand new aluminum carriages. On July 4, 2013, exactly 150 years after Lee's army retreated through this town after Gettysburg, Williamsport held a full rededication and brought the real cannons home for good.
They're still there today, part of the Civil War Walking Tour, on the same hill Doubleday held in 1861.
Lost for a decade. Restored on the exact anniversary that mattered most. That's not luck. That's a town that actually cares what happens to its own history.

07/23/2026

25 plus handmade vendors. Air conditioning. Food trucks. Coffee. This is not a hard sell.
Sweet Notes Bakery is hosting The Handmade Market in the Otho Holland Event and Banquet Hall at the Williamsport Volunteer Fire - Emergency Medical Services Inc Fire Hall. Jewelry, decor, gifts, sweets, and more, all handmade, all local.
Free and family friendly. Visit under the events tab on our page to see the list of vendors and some of the items they will feature for purchase
Saturday, July 25.