Travel: The Wonders of Harpers Ferry

Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, crucible of the Civil War.

(West Virginia Tourism)

Jefferson Rock needs a little support in its old age. The geologic formation, precariously balanced on a ledge above Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, received bracing from four sandstone pillars sometime around 1860. The view from it, however, needs no assistance at all. Far below it the Shenandoah River follows a collision course with the Potomac, a meeting that occurs beneath the rocky bluffs of Maryland Heights, Maryland, and Loudoun Heights, West Virginia. Even in the twenty-first century, this is a place of primal, romantic beauty. “This scene is worth a voyage across the Atlantic,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1783, when he visited.

President George Washington authorized construction of a Federal armory at Harpers Ferry in the 1790s. The industrial boost gave the young town a period of prosperity, as the armory’s line of brick buildings along the Potomac turned out thousands of weapons. Meriwether Lewis stopped by in 1803 to obtain equipment for his journey with William Clark. In 1859 the abolitionist John Brown raided Harpers Ferry, hoping to use weapons captured from the armory’s arsenal to arm a slave insurrection.

The National Park Service administers a portion of Harpers Ferry today, and visitors take shuttle buses from the visitor center outside town into the historic district, a compact area along the waterfront with restored nineteenth-century buildings. Several of them contain little museums and recreations. You can peer into the White Hall Tavern, a dry goods store, the provost marshal’s office, the Philip Frankel & Company clothing store, and a watch-repair shop. In Mrs. Cornelia Stipes’s recreated boarding house, you can see a bedroom as James Taylor knew it. Taylor was a Union soldier turned Civil War correspondent who stayed there and sketched himself at work in his rented room.

From the scenic waterfront, Harpers Ferry turns vertical as the High Street, lined with historic brick and stone buildings, climbs away from the rivers. Stone steps, carved into the rock, rise from High Street on an even steeper ascent to the Harper House, the place’s oldest surviving building. Robert Harper, who founded the town, died in 1782 before he could move in, and the structure now contains several rooms furnished to illustrate its gradual decline from a proud showcase to a series of increasingly drab apartments.

Even higher up, St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church sits on the edge of a steep drop above the historic district. Built in 1833, the church has fared much better than St. John’s Episcopal Church, farther up the hill. St. John’s, which dates from 1852, served as a barracks and a hospital during the war but now survives only as a picturesque ruin.

Continue climbing, past Jefferson Rock and through pretty Harper Cemetery, and you’ll reach the 1847 Lockwood House, built to serve as quarters for the army’s paymaster. The Union generals Henry H. Lockwood and Philip Sheridan used the building as headquarters during the war, and afterward it served as Storer Normal School, later Storer College, an institution founded primarily to educate freed slaves.

Storer College is just one of the threads of African-American history that wind through the Harpers Ferry story, the centerpiece of which is John Brown’s raid. Brown’s life was a series of hardships and failures until the abolitionist cause gave him an outlet for his stern, Calvinistic energies. His cause—the elimination of slavery—was just. His methods were extreme. In “Bleeding Kansas,” Brown and his followers hacked to death five proslavery settlers. In Harpers Ferry, he led a raid he hoped would end the institution forever.

He and his raiders made their final plans in a small cabin at the Kennedy farm in nearby Maryland (the cabin still stands). On the night of October 16, 1859, the band crossed the railroad bridge over to Harpers Ferry. They captured the arsenal and took some hostages, but things soon unraveled. Residents and local militia took up arms and fought back, forcing Brown and his surviving raiders to hole up in the armory’s fire-engine house. That little brick building, now known as “Brown’s Fort,” stands near the waterfront, the only surviving structure from the once-sprawling arsenal complex. In 1968 it was moved to its present position, about 150 feet from an obelisk on the railroad embankment that marks its original site.

Marines under Col. Robert E. Lee stormed the fort and captured Brown. After a trial he was sentenced to hang in nearby Charles Town. He wrote just before his execution, “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away but with Blood. I had as I know think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done.”

Brown’s raid sent tremors through a country that was already sliding toward Civil War. A granite marker tucked away alongside the Park Service’s John Brown Museum, at the corner of Shenandoah and Potomac Streets, illustrates how people struggled over the raid’s legacy long after the war ended. The granite stone remembers Heyward Shepherd, a free black man who was working as a baggage master for the B&O Railroad in 1859. He became the raid’s first fatality after Brown’s men shot him when he went to investigate a stopped train. The monument, originally conceived in the 1920s as a “Faithful Slave Memorial,” was erected amid controversy in 1931 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. It cites Shepherd as an example of “the faithfulness of thousands of negroes,” a message that offended many. W. E. B. DuBois, for one, denounced the dedication ceremony as a “proslavery celebration.”

The purging that Brown prophesied came soon enough, and Harpers Ferry suffered from it. Confederates troops burned the armory in April 1861. “The entire place is not actually worth ten dollars,” wrote one of the many soldiers who passed through over the next four years. One of those soldiers had had his first command there in the war’s early days, when he was plain Col. Thomas Jackson. As the suddenly legendary “Stonewall,” Jackson returned in September 1862, ordered by Gen. Robert E. Lee to neutralize the Union force stationed in town.

A small museum in the historic district outlines the events of this Battle of Harpers Ferry. Once the Confederates possessed Maryland Heights and Loudoun Heights, the green Union forces in Harpers Ferry were doomed. “They made it too hot for any troops to stand,” a Union soldier recalled; “so we were obliged to change our line very frequently, to save the men from slaughter.” The Union forces retreated to Bolivar Heights, outside of town. Their commander, Col. Dixon Miles, decided to surrender just before he was mortally wounded. Jackson captured almost 13,000 Union soldiers—the largest surrender of U.S. troops until World War II—and then hurried off to help Lee at Antietam.

The Civil War brought another change to Harpers Ferry. Before the war, the town lay in the state of Virginia. During the war, a number of counties split off from the old commonwealth, and in 1863 they entered the Union as a new state. Harpers Ferry has been in West Virginia ever since.

If you visit Harpers Ferry National Historic Park, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, remember that parking is limited in town; you are encouraged to park at the visitor center on the outskirts, off Route 340, and take a shuttle bus. Admission to the park is $6 per private vehicle; $4 for individuals on foot, bike, or motorcycle. The park is open daily except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.; visit www.nps.gov/hafe or call (304) 535-6298. The path to Jefferson Rock is fairly easy, but the stone steps are steep and sometimes slippery. The more adventurous can follow longer hiking trails to the tops of Maryland and Loudoun Heights.

—Tom Huntington is the author of Pennsylvania Civil War Trails, to be published by Stackpole Books in March.