Our Museum Building

The National Road Museum is housed inside a former hardware store.  Both museum buildings are owned by the Town of Boonsboro and leased to the National Road Heritage Foundation.

The town acquisition of the property after the closure of the hardware store in the early 2000’s allowed for the construction of Shafer Park Drive and improvements to the town water system.  A portion of the town’s water comes from the Warrenfeltz Spring which originates under the property.

Warrenfeltz Hardware was built on this site in 1913, the original wooden structure replacing an earlier saw mill which had used water from the spring.  In 1933, a fire destroyed the original store and this slightly larger block structure was constructed.

Fun Fact: As a depression-era building, the National Road Museum structure made use of a cost-cutting technique which can be found in buildings of that era across the country. 

Instead of a single “I” beam supporting the length of the first floor, several pieces of used trolley track are bolted together up to 5-pieces wide as the floor support, and set atop multiple vertical supports.  This is as strong or stronger than modern support joists.

After the purchase of the building by the Town of Boonsboro, it was decided to put the building to public use as a museum.  Various ideas were considered including the relocation of the Boonsborough Museum of History and the creation of a Boonsboro Civil War Museum.  After the formation of the National Road Heritage Foundation in 2005, George Wunderlich, the then-Director of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, suggested instead that there were no museums in the region dedicated to the story of the National Road.

The Foundation focused on restoring the Boonsboro Trolley Station which opened as a museum in 2009, and then set its sights on the National Road Museum.  The building was stripped down to the studs, new staircases and floors were installed, and new interior walls were created.

Exhibits were installed in the fall of 2024, with the museum opening on December 14th of that year.

Four stages of the building renovation as seen from the same location.