Overview
The Rossborough Inn faces Route 1 at the University of Maryland, College Park — built between 1798 and 1812 as a turnpike inn on the Baltimore–Washington road, making it the campus's oldest building, its guests in tradition including Lafayette on his triumphal 1824 tour; in 1864, during Jubal Early's raid toward Washington, Confederate cavalry under Bradley Johnson breakfasted here, the war brushing the future campus. Long since absorbed into university use — offices, faculty club eras, event rooms — the inn carries the college's senior ghost story: 'Miss Bettie', described in decades of staff telling as a woman in Civil War-era dress glimpsed in the upper rooms and garden, associated by tradition with the inn's wartime housekeeping; accounts add vases moved, doors locking, footsteps, and a figure at the windows in summer when the building sits quiet. Identifications are campus folklore. A working university building, visited within campus norms. Present the Rossborough as Maryland's road-era survivor first, Miss Bettie its affectionate institutional tradition.