Shepherdstown is a town in Jefferson County, West Virginia. The town was founded on 23 December 1762 as "Mecklenburg", and it was named for Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the wife of King George III of Great Britain; Shepherdstown and Romney are West Virginia's oldest towns. Thomas Shepherd was granted 222 acres of land in 1734, and the town was renamed in his honor in 1798. In 1787, James Rumsey successfully tested his new invention, the steamboat, on the Potomac River at Shepherdstown. The railroad ran through Shepherdstown starting in the 1830s, as did the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, spurring the town's growth. Shepherdstown was used by the Confederates as a hospital for its casualties from the Battle of Antietam, and the Battle of Shepherdstown saw Robert E. Lee's retreating Army of Northern Virginia fight a successful rearguard action against the advance guard of the Union Army of the Potomac. The entire town was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1987, and the town was the site of peace talks between Israel and Syria in 2000. By 2021, Shepherdstown had a population of 1,494 people, of whom 85.5% were white, 9.5% Black, 2.9% Hispanic, and 1.3% Asian.
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