Harpers Ferry

Harpers Ferry is a town in Jefferson county, in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia. It lies at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where West Virginia, Virginia, and Maryland converge. When the town was part of Virginia, it was the site of the Harpers Ferry Raid, one of the major incidents precipitating the American Civil War, and of several battles of the war.

The town was settled in 1734 by Robert Harper, who established a ferry across the Potomac and a grist mill on the Shenandoah. The site was selected by President George Washington for a federal armoury because of its waterpower potential and was purchased from Harper's heirs in 1796. The town developed as an important U.S. arsenal and centre for the manufacture of rifles. In the 1830s the arrival of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal turned the town into a commercial hub for a time.

On October 16–18, 1859, the arsenal of Harpers Ferry was the target of an assault by an armed band of abolitionists led by John Brown. The raid was intended to be the first stage in an elaborate plan to establish an independent stronghold of freed slaves in the mountains of Maryland and Virginia—an enterprise that had won moral and financial support from several prominent Bostonians. Choosing Harpers Ferry because of its arsenal and its location as a convenient gateway to the South, Brown and his band of 16 whites and 5 blacks seized the armoury on the night of October 16. The entire countryside was quickly alerted, and combined state and federal troops overwhelmed the raiders in two days. Seventeen men died in the fighting, including two of Brown's own sons; Brown and six surviving followers, after being tried at Charles Town, were hanged before the end of the year. Although the raid on Harpers Ferry was denounced by a majority of Northerners, it outraged Southern slaveholders, who were already fearful of slave insurrections, and convinced them that abolitionists would stop at nothing to eradicate their “peculiar institution.”

Once the war began Harpers Ferry served as an important link in the defense of Washington, D.C., and was repeatedly attacked by both Union and Confederate armies. The most notable battle occurred when Confederates under General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson captured the town (September 13–15, 1862) and took more than 12,500 prisoners, the largest Union surrender in the war.

In 1869 Storer College opened there as a coeducational, multiethnic institution. The college was chosen in 1906 by W.E.B. Du Bois as one of the sites for the annual meetings of the Niagara Movement, which was a precursor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909). Storer College closed in 1955.

Harpers Ferry is now a quiet residential village and is the headquarters of a resort area that includes Harpers Ferry National Historic Park. The park, with an area of about 3.5 square miles (9 square km), is situated in Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. It was authorized as a national monument in 1944 and redesignated as a national historic park in 1963. It contains museums, monuments, and historic buildings associated with the raid, the Civil War, and other aspects of the region's history. Inc. 1763. Pop. (2000) 307; (2008 est.) 309.

Copyright © 1994-2009 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. For more information visit Britannica.com.