Harpers Ferry

Harpers Ferry is where the war started early. On the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown and eighteen men — fourteen white, five Black — crossed from the Kennedy Farm hideout, seized the federal armory, arsenal, and rifle works, took hostages, and proclaimed emancipation. Thirty-six hours later Robert E. Lee's Marines stormed the fire engine house where the survivors were barricaded — the building forever after called John Brown's Fort. Brown was hanged in December, saying he was now quite certain the sins of this guilty land could only be purged with blood. Eighteen months later the nation agreed.

The town Brown chose was the one George Washington had armed — the second national armory, established 1799 at the Potomac-Shenandoah confluence, producing over 600,000 muskets and rifles in sixty years. Lewis outfitted his Corps of Discovery there in 1803. The industrial village at the rivers' meeting was also a transportation hinge — the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad both reached through the water gap.

When the war Brown prophesied came, Harpers Ferry was indefensible — a bowl surrounded by heights — and changed hands repeatedly: the 1861 Confederate evacuation burned the armory; September 1862 brought the war's largest surrender, 12,000 Union troops to Stonewall Jackson, three days before Antietam; Storer College, founded 1867 in the war's ruins, became West Virginia's first school for freed Black students — and in 1906 hosted the second Niagara Movement meeting, the civil rights organization that became the NAACP, in the town where John Brown made his stand.

Harpers Ferry is the archive's confluence file — the armory town where John Brown's 1859 raid lit the fuse, where 12,000 surrendered in 1862, and where the Niagara Movement gathered in 1906 at the college built on Camp Hill.