Harpers Ferry

Harper’s Ferry

Few places we have ever visited compare with Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. Uniquely situated at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, nestled in a beautiful valley and steeped in history, Harper’s Ferry has something to delight every visitor.

The entire region is an outdoors paradise, with miles of hiking trails, wonderful fishing opportunities, hunting, and back country you could travel in for weeks. Artists and photographers will be enthralled with the scenic wonders awaiting them around every bend in the road.

History buffs will remember the role the small mountain town played in the drama leading up to the Civil War, when radical abolitionist John Brown raided the Federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry to arm his revolution against slaveholders. But that was only one incident in a history filled with events big and small that helped shape the region and the nation as a whole. Long before Brown and his ragtag army of escaped slaves and idealists descended on the community, Harpers Ferry was an important industrial location and a crossroads for events that stretched far past the ridges of the mountains surrounding the little valley.

Thomas Jefferson stopped in Harpers Ferry in 1783 while on his way to Philadelphia to serve as a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress. George Washington had explored the region as a surveyor and realized the power the two rivers had as they converged here. As President, he established a Federal armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry to help safeguard the new nation and to give a jump start to our industrial development. Meriwether Lewis came to Harpers Ferry in 1803 to stock up on supplies he and fellow explorer William Clark would need on their expedition to the Pacific.

In response to John Brown’s raid, Robert E. Lee, a U.S. Army officer at the time, led a detachment of marines to put down the rebellion. Lee’s aide was a young Lieutenant named J.E.B. Stuart, who would go on to win fame as a Confederate cavalry officer during the Civil War.

After the South seceded, men like Stonewall Jackson and Phillip Sheridan waged war here, and one flamboyant young officer named George Armstrong Custer would meet his future wife in Harpers Ferry during a lull in the campaign.

After the Civil War, former slave Frederick Douglas came to Harpers Ferry to lecture at Storer College, and in 1906 W.E.B. DuBois brought the Niagara Movement, which went on to become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), here for its first public meeting. Throughout its history, Harpers Ferry has been the setting for dramas large and small. It has seen good times and bad, affluent times and depression, war and peace, and the fury of Mother Nature, which all but destroyed the community on more than one occasion.

Early explorers found the valley rich in natural resources, with large deposits of iron ore and limestone, vast hardwood forests, and abundant water power. The gap between the mountains offered a perfect avenue for travel from east to west. The first settler in Harpers Ferry was a Pennsylvania Dutchman named Peter Stephens, who realized the potential the location offered and started a ferry boat service here in 1733. Robert Harper, a Philadelphia millwright bought out Stephens in 1747 and named the settlement after himself. Harper improved the ferry operation Stephens had begun, and built a gristmill.

Others soon followed, taking advantage of the power the rivers offered to run industrial machinery, and an iron foundry, flour and cotton mills, and machine shops were built, all powered by water from the Shenandoah River. The ferry was replaced by a bridge over the Potomac River in 1824, and by 1836 a 900 foot covered railroad bridge was in place. (It was this bridge that John Brown and his raiders would use when they attacked the town in 1859.) The Chesapeake & Ohio Canal was extended to Harpers Ferry , and was soon followed by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. The arrival of the railroad and canal were the final steps needed to transform Harpers Ferry into a busy industrial hub. With rivers to power the factories and the railroad and canal to transport their goods, Harpers Ferry was perfectly suited for growth. During this period of expansion, a toll bridge was built to span the Shenandoah River .

By 1860 Harpers Ferry was a busy place, boasting seven combination hardware/dry goods stores, four clothing stores, four tailors, five shoemakers, four taverns, and six churches along its narrow streets. The population numbered about 3,000, mostly workers employed at the Federal Armory or local factories, and their families. Among them were about 150 free blacks, and another 150 slaves, whose owners rented them out to the government to work in the armory.

Farmers and butchers found a ready market for their fresh produce and meat, and trains delivered fresh seafood from Chesapeake Bay . With land at a premium in the narrow valley, most businesses were crammed along three major streets, with the homes of the working men mingled among them and blasted out of rock faces on the steep hills surrounding the town.

The main industry in Harpers Ferry was the Federal Armory, which included a musket factory that took up twenty brick structures stretching 600 yards along the bank of the Potomac River, along with two arsenal buildings in which were stored thousands of finished weapons, and a rifle factory located about a half mile away on Upper Hall Island in the Shenandoah River. In the armory, skilled craftsmen turned out some of the finest firearms of the day, earning an average of just over $2 for each ten hour shift worked. Between 1799 and 1860, the armory turned out more than 600,000 muskets, rifles, and pistols.

Harpers Ferry was a busy place, but not without its problems. Housing was in short supply. Homes did not have indoor plumbing, the residents using outhouses in their back yards. Women had few job opportunities and had not yet won the right to vote. The question of slavery was a growing issue, both nationally and on the local scene. Health problems plagued much of the population, much of them due to poor sanitation. Manure and stagnant water often covered the streets. Hogs roamed at will, and a heavy blanket of coal smoke from the local factories hung heavy in the air. Periodic floods wiped out much of the town, forcing residents to rebuild, and a cholera epidemic in 1850 took more than 100 lives.

On the eve of the Civil War, Harpers Ferry was still part of the state of Virginia. West Virginia had not been established as a separate state yet. Born in Torrington, Connecticut and raised in Ohio, John Brown was the son of a religious fanatic who was deeply opposed to slavery. He took on his father’s hatred for the practice of owning slaves, and began a restless life of moving about and trying to succeed in business while becoming very active in the anti-slave movement. Brown worked as a farmer, wool merchant, surveyor, land speculator, and tanner, living in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts. He failed several times at business, filed bankruptcy at least once, and fathered twenty children. Through much of his life Brown was burdened with disease and unhappiness. Nine of his children and his first wife died, and Brown once told a friend that he had “a steady, strong desire to die.” Some speculate that it was only his involvement in the anti-slavery movement that kept him alive.

By 1855, Brown was living in Kansas, a hotbed of contention over the slavery issue. He led a group of anti-slavery guerillas in the frequently bloody clashes with those who supported slavery, including one massacre in which Brown’s men killed five settlers in a slave holding town.

Brown began to work on a grandiose plan in which he would lead an armed uprising of escaped slaves against their former masters, and returned to the east to recruit an army to help set the scheme in motion. On Sunday evening, October 16, 1859, Brown and 21 followers slipped into Harpers Ferry with the intention of seizing the 100,000 weapons in the Federal arsenal to arm his rebellion. Among the raiders were two of Brown’s sons and five free black men and escaped slaves.

At 10:30 p.m. the raid began. They first cut the telegraph wires, then attacked the arsenal and seized the bridges leading out of town. It is ironic that when John Brown set his plan to start a rebellion to end slavery and free blacks in motion, the first person the raiders killed was Heyward Shepherd, a free black man employed by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, when he tried to send out a warning about the attack.

The raiders quickly seized the armory, arsenal, and rifle works, and took the night watchmen captive. About a dozen slaves were freed from county farms and their owners taken hostage. By 10 a.m. Monday morning Brown had taken 39 hostages and skirmishes with townspeople had resulted in three deaths of their deaths, as well as one of the raiders being killed. But the plan was doomed to failure.

Brown expected a massive uprising of local slaves when word of the raid got out, and planned on them rushing to his side to help in the revolt. Instead, hundreds of volunteer militia converged on Harpers Ferry. They cut off Brown’s escape routes and killed nearly half of his men by mid-afternoon. Brown and what was left of his band retreated to the small brick building that housed the armory’s fire wagon, taking their hostages with them. Enraged townspeople used the dead bodies of Brown’s men for target practice.

When word reached Washington, D.C. of the raid, President James Buchanan ordered Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee (who later would resign his commission to lead the Confederate army) to put down the rebellion. Lee and his troops arrived and surrounded the building, which later became known as Brown’s Fort, and the raiders were ordered to surrender. Brown, with only four men left to fight, refused and on Tuesday morning the troops made their assault, a brief skirmish lasting only minutes.

Thirty-six hours after it began, John Brown’s raid was history. The hostages he had taken were rescued, no slaves escaped, and what was left of his men were captured and eventually sentenced to hang. When John Brown was executed on December 2, 1859, he became a martyr to the anti-slavery cause. The small insurrection he tried in vain to start was one of the sparks that would erupt into the Civil War two years later.

The same strategic location on the railroad, rivers, and canal that had helped shape Harpers Ferry were also its downfall during the Civil War. On April 18, 1861, less than 24 hours after Virginia seceded from the Union, Federal troops burned the armory and arsenal to keep them out of rebel hands before they left town. The arsenal and 15,000 weapons were lost, but the fire at the armory was put out by southern sympathizers and the equipment salvaged and shipped south to aid the Confederate cause. When southern forces abandoned Harpers Ferry two months later, they burned most of the remaining factory buildings and blew up the railroad bridge. Between 1861 and 1865, the town changed hands eight times as the war ebbed and flowed around Harpers Ferry .

By the end of the war, there was not much left of the once-thriving industrial town. Many of its citizens had left the area to escape the fighting, the factories and bridges had been burned, and those who remained behind had to struggle to pick up the pieces that were left. Many white people resented the newly-freed blacks who they now had to compete with for the few jobs available, and a series of devastating floods destroyed much of what had survived the war. The government sold off the armory and arsenal buildings and Harpers Ferry was almost a ghost town.

For decades the community hung on by a thread, until the National Park Service established Harpers Ferry National Historic Park. Today Harpers Ferry is a popular tourist destination, and visitors from all over the country and the world come to learn about the history of the area and to take advantage of the many recreational opportunities to be found nearby.

The park includes much of the downtown area, which has been rebuilt to the community’s glory days. From the Visitor Center, a free shuttle bus takes visitors to the historic Lower Town , where exhibits and displays tell the town’s story. Visitors can explore the old buildings, see the “fort” where John Brown made his last stand, and walk across a no longer used railroad bridge to get a different view of the town and surrounding hillsides.

There are several nice shops in Harpers Ferry, along with bed and breakfast operations, and a KOA campground located at the entrance to the park. Whether you come for the history, or to explore the beautiful countryside surrounding Harpers Ferry, I think you will soon find yourself agreeing with me that this is one of the prettiest spots in America.