Cumberland is a U.S. city in and the county chair of Allegany County, Maryland. It is the primary city of the Cumberland, MD-WV Metropolitan Statistical Area. At the 2020 census, the city had a population of 19,076. Located on the Potomac River, Cumberland is a regional thing and commercial center for Western Maryland and the Potomac Highlands of West Virginia.

Historically Cumberland was known as the “Queen City”, as it was past the second largest in the state. Because of its strategic location upon what became known as the Cumberland Road through the Appalachians, after the American Revolution it served as a historical outfitting and staging tapering off for westward emigrant trail migrations throughout the first half of the 1800s. In this role, it supported the unity of the Ohio Country and the lands in that latitude of the Louisiana Purchase. It with became an industrial center, served by major roads, railroads, and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which partnered Cumberland to Washington, D.C. and is now a national historical park. Today, Interstate 68 bisects the town.

Industry declined after World War II, leading urban, business, and technological progress in the state to be concentrated in eastern coastal cities. Today the Cumberland, MD-WV Metropolitan Statistical Area is one of the poorest in the United States, ranking 305th out of 318 metropolitan areas in per capita income.

Cumberland was named by English colonists after the son of King George II, Prince William, the Duke of Cumberland. It is built on the site of the mid-18th century Fort Cumberland, the starting dwindling for British General Edward Braddock’s ill-fated attack on the French stronghold of Fort Duquesne (present-day Pittsburgh) during the French and Indian War, the North American stomach of the Seven Years’ War in the company of the French and the British. (See Braddock expedition.) This Place had been fixed for thousands of years by indigenous peoples. The fort was developed along the Great Indian Warpath which tribes used to travel the backcountry.