Wow, has American history come alive for me on this trip! I keep getting insights about how the natural resources attracted native peoples and their subsistence lives, then colonial settlement and their resource-extraction economies. How the labor forces evolved to include more nationalities and ethnicities, and the community evolved sociologically. Some settlements were abandoned when the natural resources were spent or the economy changed. Some communities evolved and grew. It’s all so fascinating to understand more of how this country came to be where we are today. Harpers Ferry is one of many similar stories, but is particularly writ large with the scale and strategic importance at its peak and, well, now being a frozen-in-time national park.
Harpers Ferry has the additional distinction of being where John Brown was defeated in a raid on a federal armory, intending to start a slave liberation movement in 1859. Historians widely attribute that the raid and Brown’s trial escalated the tensions that led to the Civil War. Interestingly, it also was the site of the second meeting of the Niagara Movement, the forerunner to the NAACP.
There’s a lot of text in this one, but it’s interesting!!
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- Industries in Harpers Ferry included: cotton mills, flour mills, saw mill, iron foundry, oil mill, machine shop, blacksmith, tannery, wagon making, barrel making and rifle works.
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- Railroad bridge over the Potomac River, where it meets with the Shenandoah River.
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- Harpers Ferry is also in the mid-Atlantic region where African Americans both free and slaves were both significantly present in the same communities, creating a powerful dynamic. In 1867, Storer College was founded in Harpers Ferry for all races and both genders.
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- Shenandoah Street
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- Shenandoah Street
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- Inside the Dry Goods Store
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- Church Street
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- The fire engine house that John Brown and his followers used as a fort.
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- The Niagara Movement, the civil rights organization founded by W.E.B. DuBois that was a forerunner to the NAACP, held its second meeting at Storer College in 1906.
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- And… Harpers Ferry is on the Appalachian Trail!
