More than twenty natural springs feed Town Run before it enters the south end of town. After the Civil War, the name became Shepherdstown. Later 18th century enactments granted self government, enlarged the town limits, and changed the name to Shepherd’s Town. As the sole trustee, Shepherd retained chief responsibility for its government. In 1762, the Virginia Assembly established the town as Mecklenburg. For a brief time the settlement there was called Pack Horse Ford or Swearingen’s Ferry. In 1734, Thomas Shepherd took up a tract of 222 acres on the south side of the Potomac, along the Falling Spring Branch, now known as Town Run. The colony of Virginia began issuing Valley land grants in the 1730s, but settlers in the area of what became Shepherdstown had arrived earlier, perhaps before 1720. Later it was known as the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road, a major north-south connector of colonial and early America.
There, Native American tribes once clashed at what was then part of the Warrior Path. Many crossed the Potomac River at Pack Horse Ford, about one mile downriver from the modern site of Shepherdstown. Colonial settlers began their migration into the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley in the early 1700s.
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