Off the beaten track since the 1960s when a by-pass road was built around it, Keedysville is a quiet, historic town on Little Antietam Creek (right, oval). It was that creek and an early road crossing that had attracted settlers to the area in the early 1700s. Jacob Hess built a large grist mill and his home there in 1768. The community that grew around the mill was known as Mill Property until 1825 when the Boonsboro-Sharpsburg road was built— Mill Property was at the halfway point, so naturally its name became Centreville. But when the town got a post office in 1848, the name was changed again, this time to Keedysville. Storekeeper Samuel Keedy was a descendent of one of the town’s earliest settler families (the German pronunciation of their name having been corrupted over the years from Guding to Geeting to Keedy)—and besides that he had lobbied hard for the post office.
