William Winchester (1706-1790) purchased approximately 167 acres of land in the area in 1754, which became known as White's Level and later the town of Winchester. In 1768, the Maryland General Assembly changed the name of the town to Westminster to avoid confusion with
Winchester, Virginia. On June 28, 1863, the Civil War skirmish of
Corbit's Charge was fought in the streets of Westminster, when two companies of
Delaware cavalry attacked a much larger
Confederate force under General
J. E. B. Stuart. This action delayed Stuart's forces from their joining the
Battle of Gettysburg. In April 1865, Joseph Shaw, editor for the
Western Maryland Democrat, suffered an attack at his paper: his presses were wrecked and his business destroyed. He was subsequently beaten and stabbed to death by four men in Westminster, allegedly because of an anti-
Lincoln editorial that he published the week before the
assassination of the president. In a later trial at the Westminster Court House, the four men were acquitted; they had claimed "self-defense" in their case. Since 1868, Westminster has held an annual Memorial Day parade, which is one of the longest continuously running Memorial Day parades in the country. A historic marker states that Westminster was the first place in the nation to offer
Rural Free Delivery postal service. On March 10, 2006, members of the
Westboro Baptist Church picketed the funeral of Matthew A. Snyder at St. John Catholic Church in Westminster. He had been killed in the
Iraq War. Snyder's father sued the Baptist church for violating his privacy; the
United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of the church on free speech grounds in
Snyder v. Phelps. On June 26, 2015, the city of Westminster lit the Westminster Fiber Network, the first community-wide
gigabit fiber to the premise network in the
Mid-Atlantic region. The city partnered with
Ting Inc., a subsidiary of
Tucows, to light the network and provide gigabit services. ==Geography==