EPILOGUE
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. [29] and [30].) The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad bridge across the Potomac, by which Brown and his raiders entered Harpers Ferry in October 1859, was destroyed by Confederate soldiers early in the Civil War. More modern structures span the river now, but the stone supports of the old bridge can still be seen. Nothing at all remains of the bridge across the Shenandoah. The stone piers now standing in the river near the Point section of the town are from a later structure.
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 appearance at the time of the raid. Here also can be seen the excavated remains of the small U.S. arsenal and some of the partially exposed burned muskets destroyed when the building was gutted by Federal troops in April 1861.