.

Commissioned by the Maryland State Legislature in 1777, the Barracks was part of a plan to construct similar structures at Annapolis and at the head of the Elk River. Though originally intended to accommodate two battalions of soldiers, it was soon put into use to house a large number of Hessians who had been captured at Bennington and Saratoga, and later, the British forces that were taken prisoner at Yorktown.
The location chosen to build the Barracks was at a place called Hollerstown Hill , about a half mile south of the town of Frederick, or Frederick Town, or Friedrichstadt, as the Germans called it. Prisoner Lieutenant Johann Ernst Prechtel described Frederick Town as an �entirely modern little town, beautiful and perfectly planned, about eighty years old, and settled predominantly by Germans�. The community supported agriculture and small scale manufacturing, such as the making of bells, in the German manner , producing linens, hides, honey, butter and apples. 
In the summer of 1777, a local man, Abraham Faw, had been contracted to build the Barracks for a cost of �8,000, however, he had great difficulty in finding workers and materials. Pressures increased to complete the construction in preparation for receiving its first group of prisoners, but it appears that Faw failed to meet his deadline, and the work was still unfinished as late as December 1779. 
On November 2, 1781, the Council of Maryland warned the Barracks would be insufficient to hold all the prisoners, and empowered the guard to appropriate any structure necessary to house them, including the �Poor House�, the Logged Gaol, and every other empty house. By the first week in December, it was reported that between fifteen and eighteen hundred prisoners had already arrived at the Barracks at Frederick Town, with over 2,000 more expected soon.
The group from Winchester arrived on January 31, 1782. The day after, on February 1, all the English prisoners were transported away to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, leaving the camp for the Germans. The two Hessian regiments already there were moved out of the Poor House and into the Barracks, leaving the Poor House to be used as a field hospital. 
The state of Maryland was overwhelmed and unable to handle the impossible task of properly housing and caring for the great influx of so many prisoners all at once. The bitter cold and the acute lack of supplies continued to 

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20 P. Kirby Gull, M. DIV., MSW, A Captor�s Conundrum: The Management of German Prisoners After Yorktown, A Maryland Perspective, Journal of The Johannes Schwalm Historical Association, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2003. p. 36.
21 Hazel K. McCanner, Historian, Maryland School for the Deaf, The Hessian Barracks: A Witness to History, June, 1976, p. 4.
22 Diary in Bavarian War Archives Tells of Hessians Here in 1780�s, newspaper article from research conducted by Dr. Harold J. Clem, July 15, 1946, Frederick, Maryland Newspaper Clipping.
23 P. Kirby Gull, M. DIV, MSW, A Captor�s Conundrum: The Management of German Prisoners After Yorktown, A Maryland Perspective.