Site
Harpers Ferry NHP Visitor Center
171 Shoreline Drive
Harpers Ferry, WV 25425
NPS Visitors Center to Lower Town Trail
1.6 miles, 150 feet downhill, 30min-1hr
Parking - Visitors may park their vehicles and take a shuttle bus to the Lower Town district of the park. Riding the bus is included in the park entrance fee.
- The shuttle bus service operates every day that the park is open. Buses run every 10-15 minutes.
- During Eastern Standard Time (November 7, 2022 - March 12, 2023): Start at 9 a.m.; last bus runs at 5:30 p.m.
- During Daylight Saving Time (March 13, 2023 - November 5, 2023): Start at 9 a.m.; last bus runs at 7 p.m.
This quaint 19th century town is designated a National Historic District by the National Register. The architecture of the houses and shops reflect the town's history as a transportation hub 1800 - 1860, a strategic location during the Civil War, a thriving industrial center based on water power in the late 1800s. The Harpers Ferry National Historic Park offers museums, events, and tours. The Appalachian Trail courses through town as its halfway mark between Georgia and Maine.
Tours
HP History Guided Walking Tours
NPS Harpers Ferry Civil War Landing Page
NPS 1862 Battle of Harpers Ferry Landing Page
Bolivar Heights
This site offers hiking trails and great views of Harpers Ferry along with interpretive signs.
School House Ridge North & Schoolhouse Ridge South
NPS North Hiking Trail / NPS South Hiking Trail
School House Ridge North is where Stonewall Jackson positioned his troops during the Confederate attack against Union forces in Harpers Ferry. Both sites have trails and interpretive waysides for visitors to enjoy.
Murphy-Chambers Farm
This farm was a part of the Confederate attack in 1862. The site offers hiking trails with spectacular vistas, Civil War era artillery, earthworks, and interpretive waysides. This farm also was home to John Brown’s Fort from 1895 to 1909 after it was brought back to Harpers Ferry from Chicago. In 1906, members of the Niagara Movement took a pilgrimage to this site.
History
John Brown said that in working to free the enslaved, he was following Christian ethics, including the Golden Rule, and the Declaration of Independence, which states that "all men are created equal". He stated that in his view, these two principles "meant the same thing".
Brown first gained national attention when he led anti-slavery volunteers and his sons during the Bleeding Kansas crisis of the late 1850s, a state-level civil war over whether Kansas would enter the Union as a slave state or a free state. He was dissatisfied with abolitionist pacifism, saying of pacifists, "These men are all talk. What we need is action – action!" In May 1856, Brown and his sons killed five supporters of slavery in the Pottawatomie massacre, a response to the sacking of Lawrence by pro-slavery forces. Brown then commanded anti-slavery forces at the Battle of Black Jack and the Battle of Osawatomie.
In October 1859, Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (which became West Virginia), intending to start a slave liberation movement that would spread south; he had prepared a Provisional Constitution for the revised, slavery-free United States that he hoped to bring about.
Brown's party of 22 was defeated by a company of U.S. Marines, led by First Lieutenant Israel Greene. Ten of the raiders were killed during the raid, seven were tried and executed afterwards, and five escaped.
Several of those present at the raid would later be involved in the Civil War: Colonel Robert E. Lee was in overall command of the operation to retake the arsenal. Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart were among the troops guarding the arrested Brown, and John Wilkes Booth was a spectator at Brown's execution.
The raid was extensively covered in the press nationwide—it was the first such national crisis to be publicized using the new electrical telegraph. Reporters were on the first train leaving for Harpers Ferry after news of the raid was received, at 4 p.m. on Monday, October 17. It carried Maryland militia, and parked on the Maryland side of the Harpers Ferry bridge, just 3 miles (4.8 km) east of the town (at the hamlet of Sandy Hook, Maryland). As there were few official messages to send or receive, the telegraph carried on the next train, connected to the cut telegraph wires, was "given up to reporters", who "are in force strong as military". By Tuesday morning the telegraph line had been repaired, and there were reporters from The New York Times "and other distant papers".
John Brown had originally asked Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, both of whom he had met in his transformative years as an abolitionist in Springfield, Massachusetts, to join him in his raid, but Tubman was prevented by illness and Douglass declined, as he believed Brown's plan was suicidal.
“John Brown's zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was as the taper light; his was as the burning sun. I could live for the slave; John Brown could die for him.”
- Frederick Douglass
Brown's raid caused much excitement and anxiety throughout the United States, with the South seeing it as a threat to slavery and thus their way of life, and some in the North perceiving it as a bold abolitionist action. At first it was generally viewed as madness, the work of a fanatic. It was Brown's words and letters after the raid and at his trial – Virginia v. John Brown – aided by the writings of supporters, including Henry David Thoreau, that turned him into a hero and icon for the Union.
“…I wish I could say that Brown was the representative of the North. He was a superior man. He did not value his bodily life in comparison with ideal things. He did not recognize unjust human laws, but resisted them … No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature… He needed no babbling lawyer… to defend him. He was more than a match for all the judges… He could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist. Do yourselves the honor to recognize him. He needs none of your respect.”
- Henry David Thoreau
John Brown’s Body
"John Brown's Body" is a United States marching song about the abolitionist John Brown. The song was popular in the Union during the American Civil War. According to an 1889 account, the original John Brown lyrics were a collective effort by a group of Union soldiers who were referring both to the famous John Brown and also, humorously, to a Sergeant John Brown of their own battalion.
Julia Ward Howe heard this song during a public review of the troops outside Washington, D.C., on Upton Hill, Virginia. Howe's companion at the review suggested to Howe that she write new words for the fighting men's song. Staying at the Willard Hotel in Washington on the night of November 18, 1861, Howe wrote the verses to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic". Of the writing of the lyrics, Howe remembered:
I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, "I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them." So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pencil which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.
Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" was first published on the front page of The Atlantic Monthly of February 1862.