The New International Encyclopædia/Frederick

FRED'ERICK. A city and the county-seat of Frederick County, Md., 60 miles west-northwest of Baltimore; on the Baltimore and Ohio and the Pennsylvania railroads (Map: Maryland, H 3). It is situated in a beautiful and fertile valley near the famous battlefields of Monocacy and South Mountain. It is the seat of a State institution for the deaf and dumb, and Women's College (Reformed Church), organized in 1893, and has Boyd Academy and other educational institutions, and Emergency Hospital. There are large canning establishments, brick-works, planing-mills, and manufactures of flour, tobacco, fibre brushes, hosiery, leather, shutter-fasteners, and coaches. The government is administered under a charter of 1898 by a mayor, elected every three years, who controls the appointments to all municipal offices except that of city register, and a council elected at large. The city owns and operates its water-works and electric-light plant. Population, in 1890, 8193; in 1900, 9296. Frederick has been made famous by Whittier as the scene of Barbara Frietchie's exploit. Francis Scott Key, the author of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” is buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery, and a splendid monument to him marks its entrance; and the remains of Roger B. Taney (q.v.) lie in the burial-grounds of the Roman Catholic Church. Frederick was first settled in 1745, and was incorporated in 1817. In 1755 Washington met Braddock here to prepare for the expedition against the French. Near by Robert Strawbridge, in 1764, organized a Methodist church, ‘the first in Maryland and America.’ Consult a sketch in Powell's Historic Towns of the Southern States (New York, 1900).