A Day at Harpers Ferry

This morning we drove into Harpers Ferry to drop off a letter at the post office. The present-day towns of Bolivar and Harpers Ferry sit up on the hill. There are some really neat old houses that are still occupied.

This one is for sale. It would be an interesting "fixer-upper" --

This church steeple can be seen from all over town --

After we got back from the post office, we picked up the camera and the water bottle and went to down the road from the KOA campground to the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park which is in the three states of Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland.  The town of Harpers Ferry sits at the confluence of the Potomac and Shanandoah Rivers and has flooded out many times over the years. The National Park Service now owns all of the buildings in the Lower Town and has renovated the insides to look as they may have done in the 19th century.

Our first president, George Washington, established Harpers Ferry as the site of the new country's first armory in 1790. There were eventually twenty brick buildings along the river that manufactured arms.  Between the time the first buildings were constructed in 1799 and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the armory produced over 500,000 muskets, rifles and pistols and employed, at times, over 400 workers.

One of the renovated buildings houses many of the machines used at the United States Armory and Arsenal. This is an early rifling machine that bored the gun barrels --

And lathes for making gun stocks --

In March of 1803, the Armory was visited by Meriwether Lewis who obtained the "items needed for survival on the transcontinental expedition that he and William Clark were preparing to undertake. For protection and acquiring food, armory gunsmiths provided Lewis with modified Model 1792 contract rifles bearing Harpers Ferry lockplates, along with spare parts and tools, including a simple grindstone, to repair them. Lewis also obtained powder horns, pouches, bullet molds, knives, tomahawks, and an innovative portable iron boat frame, which he planned to cover with animal skins and use for transport beyond the Great Falls of the Missouri River."

Fifty-six years later, the weapons stored at the Armory lured the abolitionist John Brown to Harpers Ferry. In October of 1859, Brown attempted to seize the 100,000 rifles and muskets stored here in the first step of his attempt to rid the nation of slavery.

John Brown thought he could raise a slave insurrection and had ordered these pikes for the slaves to use as weapons. His raid on Harpers Ferry was foiled by local militia and US troops under the command of Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee who seized Brown and captured or killed nearly all of his raiders. Brown was later tried and died on the scaffold but his actions further divided the nation over slavery.

One of the museum buildings portrays a watchmaker's shop --

While another of the buildings houses a Civil War museum (Harpers Ferry exchanged hands between the Union and Confederate troops eight times!). This case showed fragments of hollow cannon balls with their contents --

The brick building down the street is the fire hall where John Brown made his last stand. The building, while intact, has been moved four times. The railroad now runs where it stood during his raid.

The National Park Service has done a great job of restoring the buildings in Lower Town. In addition to the various museums, there is a bookstore with an incredible collection of Civil War books.

This is the confluence of the Potomac and the Shanandoah Rivers. Thomas Jefferson stopped here with his eldest daughter Patsy in October 1783 on his way to Philadelphia to serve as a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress. No town existed then, only the Potomac and Shanandoah Rivers crashing their way through the mountains in a drama that Jefferson declared "perhaps one of the most stupendous scenes in Nature."

Remnants of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal opposite Harpers Ferry --

This is actually a portion of the Appalachian Trail, We walked across the Shanandoah River on this foot bridge that goes alongside the train bridge

The foot bridge takes the Appalachian Trail over to the tunnel on the Maryland side, then there is a spiral staircase back down to the trail at ground level.

The Potomac River was quite muddy as it approached the confluence --

It was quite warm again this afternoon and after walking around Lower Town and over the river, we were quite glad to return to the bus shelter and await the shuttle bus back to the Visitor's Center. (There are very few parking spaces in Lower Town, so the Park runs a shuttle bus from the parking lot up by the Visitor's Center every 15 minutes or so.)