Robert Harper, a Philadelphia builder, gave the community its name. He settled there sometime between 1734 and 1747. In 1761, Harper established a ferry across the Potomac, making this community a major jumping off point for settlers seeking new lands in the Shenandoah Valley and points west.
In the years to come, the Harpers Ferry Arsenal made high quality, rifled muskets and engaged in what we now call research and development. The location of the arsenal eventually attracted other industrial development.
Situated on the Maryland side of the river, the canal connected the ferry with markets in Washington, D.C. A year later, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad arrived and with it the final piece in a political-economic network that made Harpers Ferry and the recently founded community of Bolivar important to the nation’s future. How important became very clear when on October 16, 1859, notorious Kansas Free-State man and abolitionist, John Ossawatomie Brown and his “Provisional Army of the United States,” entered the village of Harper’s Ferry, Va., taken possession of the United States armory, shot two or three whites, placed guards on the railroad bridge, and stopped the passenger trains of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. John Brown saw the ferry as the place to capture arms with which to equip an army and free the slaves of the Deep South.
The President promptly dispatched a detachment of marines to the spot. On the morning of October 18, a storming party of 12 Marines, led by future Confederate States General Robert E. Lee joined with the local army broke down the door of the Armory’s fire engine house, and forced Brown’s terrorist militia into a surrender. They were found to number over twenty white men and negroes. Ten of Brown’s guerrilla’s were killed, two of which were his own sons. Brown, who had received a number of severe wounds, was arrested and charged with treason.
He confessed that his object was to liberate and run all the slaves in the adjoining counties of Virginia and Maryland. At a farm house which Brown had hired a few miles from Harper’s Ferry, were found ammunition and arms, consisting of a large number of Sharpe’s rifles, revolvers, pikes and other implements of war, together with a great amount of correspondence, consisting of letters of Gerrit Smith and Fred Douglas.
While begging for his life, John Brown’s family stated that he was insane. To prove their point they gave the following information on his lineage and the people that surrounded him throughout his life.
Nine relatives on Brown’s mother’s side were insane.
Six of Brown’s cousins were insane.
Two of his own children were insane.
He was also given the chance to testify on his own behalf and proclaimed that his life had been a constant fight to stop the institution of slavery, that from his past deeds his life should be spared.
Brown was found guilty of treason and conspiracy against the United States, on the 2d of November, was sentenced to be hung, which sentence was carried into effect on the 2d of December, 1859. Before the sentence was carried out, however, Brown issued a prophetic warning from his jail cell:
“I wish to say furthermore, that you had better, all you people at the South, prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared the better. You may dispose of me very easily; I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled, this Negro question I mean, the end of that is not yet.”
Afterwards, John Brown’s wife died, insane.
It has since been discovered that the following is a portion of the plans of abolitionists, matured in Kansas by Brown and others, and which he attempted in part to carry out:
“1. To make war (openly or secretly, as circumstances may dictate) upon the property of the slave holders and their abettor, not for its destruction, if that can be easily avoided, but to convert it to the use of the slaves. If it cannot be thus converted, then we advise its destruction. Teach the slaves to burn their master’s buildings, to kill their cattle and horses, to conceal or destroy farming utensils, to abandon labor in seed time and harvest, and let crops perish. Make slavery unprofitable in this way, if it can be done in no other.
“2. To make slave holders objects of derision and contempt, by flogging them whenever they shall be guilty of flogging their slaves.
“3. To risk no general insurrection until we of the North go to your assistance, or you are sure of success without our aid.
“4. To cultivate the friendship and confidence of the slaves; to consult with them as to their rights and interests, and the means of promoting them; to show your interests in their welfare, and your readiness to assist them; let them know that they have your sympathy, and it will give them courage, self respect and ambition, and make men of them, infinitely better men to live by, as neighbors and friends, than the indolent, arrogant, selfish, heartless, domineering robbers and tyrants who now keep both yourselves and the slaves in subjection, and look with contempt upon all who live by honest labor.
“5. To change your political institutions as soon as possible, and, in the meantime, give never a vote to a slave holder; pay no taxes to their government, if you can either resist or evade them; as witnesses and jurors, give no testimony and no verdicts in support of any slave holding claims; perform no military, patrol or police service; mob slave holding courts, jails and sheriffs; do nothing, in short, for sustaining slavery, but everything you safely can, publicly and privately, for its overthrow.”
Brown’s raid was a failure, but it set the country in motion toward civil war.
In the years that followed, Harpers Ferry was devastated by warring parties. The armory and arsenal were destroyed, its railroad bridges over the Potomac burned and later rebuilt. Usually occupied by Federal troops, it also became a refugee camp for thousands of runaway slaves making their way North. Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson captured the federal garrison there on September 15, 1862, following a lightning 51-mile march. He bagged thousands of troops and tons of supplies, not to mention hundreds of Black people who were marched South back into slavery.
After the war, the ferry was little more than a ghost town. The federal government sold what was left of the armory and arsenal and other property. Efforts to rebuild its commercial base were frequently devastated by record-breaking floods. But out of the ashes came two occurrences that impacted the country’s future. The first was a small, church-owned school for African-Americans, Storer College. In the 1890s, civil rights leaders convened there in their effort to create a new, national organization that would fight for the rights of blacks. That movement eventually led to the creation of the NAACP.