  The war that John Brown predicted would come, and which his raid helped to precipitate, began in April 1861. When it ended almost 4 years to the day later, slavery had been destroyed along with some 600,000 lives and millions of dollars worth of property. Among the casualties of the war was Harpers Ferry. The town’s strategic position on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley made it a prime target for both Union and Confederate forces. It changed hands again and again, and by war’s end in 1865 the place was a shambles. As early as February 1862 a young Union staff officer assigned to the Harpers Ferry area could write of the town: “The appearance of ruin by war and fire was awful. Charred ruins were all that remain of the splendid public works, arsenals, workshops and railroads, stores, hotels, and dwelling houses all mingled in one common destruction.” Much the same observation was made 3 years later in the summer of 1865 by John T. Trowbridge, a New England writer, during a tour of the South: “[T]he town is the reverse of agreeable. It is said to have been a pleasant and picturesque place formerly. The streets were well graded, and the hill-sides above were graced with terraces and trees. But war has changed all. Freshets tear down the centre of the streets, and the hill-sides present only ragged growths of weeds. The town itself lies half in ruins.... Of the bridge across the Shenandoah only the ruined piers are left; still less remains of the old bridge over the Potomac. And all about the town are rubbish, filth and stench.” The once-imposing armory complex along the Potomac River and the rifle works on Hall Island in the Shenandoah were burned-out hulks. Only the armory enginehouse remained basically intact, “like a monument which no Rebel hands were permitted to demolish.” Large sections of the town had been burned by various troop contingents to prevent their use by enemy soldiers. Many homes, churches, schools, and business establishments were damaged beyond repair by shot and shell fired from the surrounding heights. Still other buildings, subjected to long military use, were on the verge of ruin. The industries on Virginius Island—the iron foundry, the flour mill, the sawmill, the machine shops, the cotton mill—were also gone, and Harpers Ferry no longer had the activity and bustle of an economically healthy community. Besides the material damage inflicted by powerful weaponry and by the seemingly endless procession of soldiers who filched or requisitioned everything that could be carried away, the town suffered an even greater loss—its people. During the war most of the townspeople moved away, some to escape the dangers of military operations, some to seek employment elsewhere after the armory and the industries were destroyed, and some to join one or the other opposing armies. Many never came back. Those who did return found their town in ruins and themselves the citizens of a new State. In 1861 the people in the mountainous western counties of Virginia strongly opposed secession. When the rest of the State voted overwhelmingly in a statewide referendum on May 23, 1861, to withdraw from the Federal Union, the loyal western residents, in a series of conventions at Wheeling, voted to “secede” from Virginia and set up their own State. The bill for admission passed Congress on December 11, 1862, and on June 30, 1863, by Presidential proclamation, West Virginia became the 35th State. For years, however, many Jefferson County residents refused to use “West” as part of the designation. Harpers Ferry never recovered from the devastation of the Civil War. Staring at the stark chimneys and charred remains of once impressive buildings, one of the townspeople concluded: “This place will never be anything again unless the government rebuilds the armory—and it is doubtful if that is ever done.” The Government never did, and the ground on which it stood was auctioned off in 1869. Mills and factories remained closed. The railroad did a small percentage of its previous business. Hopes for a renewal of the town’s former prosperity were dashed in 1870 when a flood destroyed or badly damaged nearly every building on Virginius Island and along the south side of Shenandoah Street. Subsequent floods destroyed still more of the town and ruined the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. The canal was finally abandoned after the flood of 1924. Inundated too often by high water, the residents of Harpers Ferry eventually left the old buildings in the lower town and moved up the heights to the high ground of Camp Hill and toward Bolivar. For years the old shops and stores, those that remained, stood empty, neglected, and deteriorating. When Harpers Ferry became a national historical area, the National Park Service began an intensive campaign to preserve the fragile remains of the 18th- and 19th-century industries, homes, churches, stores, and shops, and to restore much of the old town to its pre-Civil War appearance, a time when it was at its peak as a thriving, bustling industrial community and transportation center. Today, while much of the old historical town remains, few of the structures that figured prominently in John Brown’s raid survive. (See maps on pp. The ruins of the armory buildings stood for many years after the war and eventually disappeared. In 1893 the site itself disappeared under 30 feet of fill when the B & O Railroad changed the line of its tracks. The outlines of two of the armory buildings have been marked by flat stones and the spot where the enginehouse was located is marked by a small monument. The enginehouse itself (now called “John Brown’s Fort”) stands nearby on the old arsenal grounds, and is little changed from its In February 1862 Federal soldiers burned the Point area of Harpers Ferry to keep Confederate sharpshooters from using the buildings. Among the structures destroyed were the railroad depot, the water tower around which Mayor Fontaine Beckham was peering when he was shot by one of the raiders, several stores and shops, the Potomac Restaurant, the Wager House Hotel, and the Gault House Saloon. The Wager House (not to be confused with another structure of the same name that still exists) was the scene of several notable events. It was here that many of the wounded were carried, including two of the raiders, Aaron Stevens and William Thompson. Many of the militiamen did their “best fighting” at its bar. From the Wager House porch, Gov. Henry Wise of Virginia read letters taken from Brown’s men to the angered townspeople. Wise also lived here during his brief stay in Harpers Ferry. Mrs. John Brown stayed here when she came to Harpers Ferry in December 1859 for her last visit with her husband, and it was here that she received his body after the execution. The Shenandoah islands are deserted today except for the line of the Winchester and Potomac Railroad. All of the buildings are gone now except for the foundations of some of the mills and the retaining walls of the rifle factory, nestled in among the weeds, brush, and trees. Many disappeared through neglect after the industries were destroyed during the Civil War, some washed away in the many floods with which Harpers Ferry has been plagued, and others, like Herr’s flour mill and the rifle works, were deliberately destroyed by Union and Confederate troops. Several structures associated with the raid still exist outside Harpers Ferry. The courthouse at Charles Town, W. Va., is little changed since John Brown was tried and sentenced there more than a century ago. The Kennedy farm, Brown’s headquarters during the months he was planning the raid, lies in the Maryland countryside about 5 miles from Harpers Ferry. Col. Lewis Washington’s home, “Beallair,” which several raiders broke into on the night of October 16 and took its owner hostage, stands near Halltown, about 4 miles west of Harpers Ferry. And nearby, at the foot of Alstadt Hill, west of Bolivar, is the home of John H. Alstadt, another hostage taken by Brown’s men on October 16. |
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