The history of Harpers Ferry
Harpers Ferry grew around a river crossing founded by Robert Harper, buried there in 1782, and became known for the small brick firehouse where John Brown made his last stand in 1859. The town changed hands in the Civil War and was protected as a national historical park from 1944.
Potomac Street in Harpers Ferry is home to John Brown's Fort, a brick fire engine house built in 1848 where abolitionist John Brown barricaded himself during his 1859 raid. U. S. Marines under Robert E. Lee stormed it that October, ending the raid. The building was later dismantled, sold, moved four times, and rebuilt near its original site.
Brown made his last stand in a fire engine house
John Brown's Fort is a small one-story brick building, now preserved as a museum piece inside Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. It once served a much plainer job. Built in 1848, it was the fire engine and guard house for the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. An 1848 military report described it plainly: an engine and guard house, 35 and a half by 24 feet, one brick story, roofed in slate, with copper gutters. For over a decade it did nothing more dramatic than store fire engines and house a guard.
The fire engine house's use changed on the night of October 16, 1859. John Brown led 21 men, 16 white and 5 Black, in a raid meant to arm enslaved people and spark a wider uprising. They seized the armory and took 60 townspeople hostage. Local militia and armed citizens killed several raiders and pinned the rest down. Brown retreated into the fire engine house with his surviving men and some hostages, and barricaded the doors.
On the night of October 17, Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee arrived with U. S. Marines, sent by President Buchanan, with J. E. B. Stuart as his aide. The next morning, Marines battered down the door with a ladder. One Marine died in the attack, along with several of Brown's men. Lieutenant Israel Greene wounded Brown with a sword as Marines stormed the building. The hostages were freed. Brown was tried and hanged for treason that December.
The fire engine house was the only Armory building left standing after the war. Soldiers of both armies used it afterward as a guardhouse and prison, and scavengers pulled bricks loose as souvenirs. Someone painted the words "John Brown's Fort" over its three doors to draw visitors, mostly Black tourists for whom the building had become, in one account, "almost a shrine."
Sold for a dollar, shipped to Chicago, then rebuilt
In 1891, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad bought the building and the ground under it, planning to reroute tracks away from the flood-prone riverbank. A buyer paid $1 to take the fort apart and ship it to Chicago, hoping to cash in on the World's Columbian Exposition. The gamble failed. Visitors saw no reason to connect "Brown's Fort" to Chicago, and only 11 people paid to see it in ten days. The building closed and sat dismantled on a vacant lot, its bricks later used to store delivery wagons.
A Washington journalist named Kate Field took up its cause in 1894. She had already helped save John Brown's farm in New York, and she pushed to bring the fort back to Harpers Ferry. The original site was gone by then. The railroad had buried it under an embankment to protect the tracks from flooding. A farmer named Alexander Murphy offered five acres on his land instead, and the Baltimore and Ohio shipped the dismantled building home for free, eager to recover the tourist traffic it had lost. Rebuilding took 8,000 new bricks to replace what souvenir hunters had carried off. The work finished in November 1895.
A Black college gave the fort a campus home
In 1909, fifty years after the raid, Storer College bought the fort and moved it onto its own campus at Camp Hill. Storer was a historically Black school, and the building became something close to a shrine and a museum there, a few miles above the lower town.
John Brown's Fort stayed on campus for nearly sixty years. Storer College closed in 1955, and the National Park Service took over the fort in 1960. In 1968, the Park Service moved it a fourth time, back down to lower Harpers Ferry, about 150 feet from where it had first stood in 1848. The railroad embankment still covers the true original spot. A white stone obelisk marks it today, a short walk from the fort itself.
The fort returned near its original Harpers Ferry ground
John Brown's Fort stands now as part of Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, open for visitors to walk through. An interpretive display inside lays out the raid in plain terms, and the building appears on West Virginia's state quarter. The doors are not the originals, and the structure carries paint and repairs from more than a century of handling, but the brick walls and slate roof are the same ones that held off Marines in 1859.
The fort sits in a small park near the river, its three arched doorways facing the street much as they did in 1859.
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