HARPERS FERRY , a ruggedly sited eighteenth-century town now restored as a national historic park, gives many visitors their first and only look at West Virginia. Clinging to steep hillsides above the rocky confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, many of the town's forty-odd brick and stone buildings date from the days when George Washington set up the country's first national munitions factory here to arm the young Republic. During the mid-1800s Harpers Ferry was a thriving industrial complex, home to some five thousand workers and linked to the capital by the B&O Railroad and the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal. After suffering the ravages of the Civil War and a series of torrential floods, however, it was all but abandoned, the empty shells of its homes and factories slowly becoming overgrown by the dense forest that covers the surrounding hills. Almost all of Harpers Ferry has since been reconstructed as an outdoor museum, combining historical importance and natural beauty.

However pretty Harpers Ferry may be - and in the fall, when the leaves blaze with color, it's hard to imagine a more picture-perfect setting - it's best known for its place in US history. The 1859 raid on its huge US arsenal by anti-slavery revolutionary John Brown , which rocked the already fragmenting nation, was the clearest foreshadowing of the Civil War, which broke out just sixteen months later. In the hope of fomenting a widespread slave revolt, Brown and twenty-one other abolitionist radicals, including two of his sons and five black men, seized the munitions factory and its large store of weapons on the night of October 16. They held out for two days before US troops, under the command of Robert E. Lee, stormed the buildings, killing many of the raiders and capturing Brown. He was taken to nearby Charles Town, put on trial just nine days later, and convicted of treason; by the time he was hanged on December 2, he was far from alone in regarding himself as a martyr to the abolitionist cause.

As one of only two places in the US with the capacity to manufacture munitions, Harpers Ferry was a major prize in the Civil War, and it never got back on its feet after the resultant devastation. The arsenal buildings were burned in 1861 to keep the weapons out of Confederate hands, while in 1862 Stonewall Jackson captured the town along with 12,500 Union soldiers. Enough of the original buildings and cobbled streets survive, however, to give a good sense of how things used to be, and the restoration project has so far managed to re-create the townscape without making it feel too much like a theme park

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Harpers Ferry

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