Winchester Hall

Winchester Hall was constructed beginning in 1843 to house the Frederick Female Seminary, a school for young women that operated under several names through the mid-nineteenth century. The cornerstone was laid in 1843 and the west wing was added by 1850, giving the building its current Greek Revival form on East Church Street near Court Square.

On September 17, 1862 — the day of the Battle of Antietam — the Union Army took over the seminary to house wounded soldiers from the South Mountain and Antietam battles, making it part of Frederick General Hospital No. 1. The Army held the building until January 17, 1863. Hundreds of amputations and other surgical procedures were performed in Frederick's hospital complex during this period; the wounded buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery and elsewhere give a sense of the scale of casualties Frederick's medical infrastructure had to handle.

In 1887, W. L. Duvall broke ground behind the building to construct an addition for the Frederick Female Seminary and unearthed a substantial quantity of human arm and leg bones. According to the National Museum of Civil War Medicine's documentation of the discovery, the ends of the bones bore the saw marks characteristic of Civil War-era surgical amputations, confirming they were medical waste from the building's wartime hospital use.

After the seminary closed, the building hosted the Women's College of Frederick, which later evolved into present-day Hood College. The structure then served various county and educational functions before being adapted as Frederick County government offices, which it remains today. Local ghost-walking tours include Winchester Hall as a regular stop because of the well-documented bone discovery and the building's medical-trauma past.