Located in a gorge at the confluence of Potomac and
Shenandoah Rivers in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Harpers Ferry is a small town
best known for John Brown’s raid in 1859 . I had visited Harpers Ferry once
before when I lived in the DC area more than 20 years ago but don’t recall it
all that well. Maybe that’s partly because I went with a co-worker named
Armando who seemed to view it as a date while I didn’t see it as such.

Harpers Ferry’s location gave it a good supply of hydro
power for mills and the second U.S. Armory was established there by George
Washington in the late eighteenth century. It was part of that armory complex
that John Brown and 21 of his supporters seized in October 1859 with the intent
of distributing arms to slaves to start a revolt. The raid was put down by the
army and Brown was tried and hanged two months later. That all I remember from
history class, but I didn’t remember that Harpers Ferry was the site of so much
fighting during the Civil War and passed back and forth between Union and
Confederate control numerous times. Much of the National Historical Park
focuses on the battlefields around Harpers Ferry.

The central lower town of Harpers Ferry is a lovely mix of
old buildings, a blend of National Park system properties that house museums
and private businesses and residences . The density of buildings in the lower
town and the way they sprawl up the steep hillside with a church above is
fairly unique in the U.S. It looks more to me like some of the small towns in
the Rhine and Mosel Valleys in Germany than a typical small U.S. town.

Harpers Ferry became a center for Black education after the
Civil War with the establishment of Storer College. The college hosted the first
meeting in the U.S. of the Niagara Movement, an early civil rights organization
that developed into the NAACP. Storer College no longer exists but the buildings
that housed it now function as NPS offices but can be toured. So altogether
these make for a huge amount of history for such a small town in a very scenic
location.