If there’s one event that made the Civil War seem inevitable, it was John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. Brown, a fervent abolitionist, gathered supporters to secure the federal armory, hoping local slaves would rise up and join his cause. They did not, and U.S. Marines under Robert E. Lee captured Brown and killed several of his men.[1]

Harpers Ferry was in Virginia at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers. Thomas Jefferson had visited the “stupendous” area in 1783, saying, “This scene is worth a voyage across the Atlantic.” The town sat at the edge of the mountains that divided Virginia in two, geographically and culturally. Western Virginians tended to have smaller farms and fewer slaves; they resented the Tidewater planter elite in Richmond. When Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861, delegates from the west voted against it. They set up a rump legislature calling itself Virginia and gave Virginia’s consent to its own division.

Congress granted statehood after a gradual-emancipation clause was added to the new state’s constitution. West Virginia became a state on June 20, 1863, 13 days before the Union victory over Lee’s forces at Gettysburg, just 44 miles away.

Harpers Ferry was all but destroyed in the war, but the firehouse where Brown made his last stand is there. The area is still spectacular, the “psychological midpoint” of the Appalachian Trail. The state born by leaving lives in American music as a mix of beauty, hard living, and longing for home.

Subscribe on Substack

All I know is that when I am good and sober

I am leaving West Virginia for a while

Don’t know why but every time I cross that river

Lord, there’s something tears me up and makes me wild

Tyler Childers

West Virginia, oh my home

West Virginia is where I belong

In the dead of the night in the still

And the quiet I slip away like a bird in flight

Back to those hills, the place that I call home

Hazel Dickens

Almost heaven, West Virginia

John Denver

Links:

• “I have never seen any man display more courage and fortitude than John Brown” – eyewitness account of the raid by John E.P. Daingerfield

  
  

• John Brown's Fort - National Park Service

  
  

• “One of the most stupendous scenes in Nature” - full quote from Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson Rock, Harpers Ferry - National Park Service

  
  

• To There and Back Again: The Many Moves of John Brown’s Fort - Jane Metters LaBarbara, West Virginia University Libraries, October 19, 2020

  
  

• West Virginia Statehood, June 20, 1863 – National Archives

  
  

This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.

Too many emails? To receive a weekly recap instead, please subscribe on my Substack blog. Instructions for turning on the weekly summary can be found here.

[1] At his execution, he famously said, “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood.”