While many take for granted the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts' place as a focal point of Hagerstown City Park, the Museum's very existence is remarkable and unlikely. A 1932 Baltimore Sun article explains the significance of this Museum's place in Hagerstown:
A Museum of Fine Arts, architecturally charming and filled with paintings and sculpture that would do credit to discriminating metropolitan institutions, is scarcely an orthodox appurtenance of a small inland American city which numbers its population at little more than 30,000 inhabitants. Such a possession, however, actually is the portion of Hagerstown and is the gift of a former resident, Mrs. William H. Singer, Jr., whose husband's reputation as a landscape painter of the first rank extends over two continents.