Court Square (Frederick City Hall)

Court Square has been Frederick's seat of justice since the colonial period, when a wooden courthouse stood on the ground now occupied by Frederick City Hall. In June 1781, during the Revolution, authorities uncovered the so-called Tory Plot, a Loyalist conspiracy to free British prisoners of war held in Frederick and reinforce Cornwallis.

Seven men were convicted of high treason and sentenced on June 17, 1781. Four were pardoned. The remaining three — Caspar Fritchie, Peter Sueman, and Yost Plecker — were executed. The Baltimore Advertiser of the day reported that they 'suffered Death' for high treason. The sentence pronounced was the full traitor's penalty of hanging, drawing, and quartering, but historians have not confirmed that the drawing and quartering were actually carried out; the contemporary newspaper records only that the men were put to death, and the harsher details rest on later local tradition.

The square's later courthouse, the brick building completed in 1862-64, served as the Frederick County courthouse for more than a century before becoming Frederick City Hall; the modern county courts moved to a separate building in 1982. Today a simple bronze plaque and small sign near the square mark the Revolutionary-era executions. Guided ghost tours of Frederick use Court Square as the stop where this history is told.