4 Best Sights in Hagerstown, Frederick and Western Maryland

A full-size model of a triceratops skull welcomes you to the Discovery Station and Hagerstown Aviation Museum, the first hands-on science museum in Western Maryland. Set in a former bank building, the museum allows kids to work the controls in the cockpit of a Cessna plane, squeeze through a model of an artery, and dig in sand for dinosaur fossils. Other popular attractions include a National Institutes of Health–sponsored exhibit on the eye and a model of the solar-powered NEAR spacecraft which traveled more than 200 million miles from the sun to explore asteroids.

In 1739 Jonathan Hager, an adventurous young German immigrant, built a stone home over two springs in a virgin forest. The Hager House and Museum still stands, a testament to Hagertown's founder and early-American life. The thick-walled home includes bedrooms, a sewing room, and a kitchen furnished with pieces from the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as a replica of the trading post that Hager operated. Guided tours include the indoor springhouse where the family preserved food and kept cool in summer. Coins, pottery, and buttons excavated from the property are on display, and Colonial-style gardens of fragrant rosemary, lavender, and thyme surround the home.

Dubbed "Hub City" due to its importance to the Western Maryland and Baltimore & Ohio railroads, Hagerstown has a rich railway history. It's been more than a decade since the city demolished the roundhouse (a circular building used for repairing steam locomotives), but the museum preserves several cabooses, locomotives, and trolley cars as well as other railroad artifacts and memorabilia. During the Christmas season the elaborate train gardens are particularly enchanting.

Shaded by trees near a placid lake at Hagerstown's City Park, the airy galleries of Washington County Museum of Fine Arts hold an eclectic mixture of American painting, from Whistler's moody La Mere Gerard to Norman Rockwell's folksy The Oculist. Portraits by members of the Peale family and Joshua Johnson, the famed African-American portrait artist, bring depth to the collection, which also includes European, Asian, and African paintings, sculptures, and prints.