BGuthrie Photos: WV -- Harpers Ferry NHP -- Exhibit: A Place In Time

WV -- Harpers Ferry NHP -- Exhibit: A Place In Time:

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[1] HARPLA_120408_002.JPG	[2] HARPLA_120408_005.JPG	[3] HARPLA_120408_014.JPG	[4] HARPLA_120408_017.JPG	[5] HARPLA_120408_024.JPG	[6] HARPLA_120408_028.JPG	[7] HARPLA_120408_034.JPG
[8] HARPLA_120408_037.JPG	[9] HARPLA_120408_042.JPG	[10] HARPLA_120408_047.JPG	[11] HARPLA_120408_051.JPG	[12] HARPLA_120408_055.JPG	[13] HARPLA_120408_058.JPG	[14] HARPLA_120408_068.JPG
[15] HARPLA_120408_075.JPG	[16] HARPLA_120408_080.JPG	[17] HARPLA_120408_084.JPG	[18] HARPLA_120408_087.JPG	[19] HARPLA_120408_092.JPG	[20] HARPLA_120408_095.JPG	[21] HARPLA_120408_099.JPG

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. HARPLA_120408_024.JPG: A Place in Time: Harpers Ferry: Streaming water has sculpted the land and life in this place. Striving generations have shaped the spirit of this town. A nation's struggles and the forces of nature have tested and tempered it. Today, Harpers Ferry bears the watermarks of time, and tells a wondrous tale. The meeting of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers was first a signpost on footpaths and waterways of Native Americans and pioneers. Later, settlers built a bustling hub of rail and canal traffic at the rivers' junction, and harnessed waterpower for mills and factories. War and floods devastated the growing town; scenic beauty and historic significance rescued it. Traces of Harpers Ferry's fluid history often lie hidden in the modern landscape. This exhibit offers clues to help unearth them. "The scenery at Harpers Ferry is very grand... The Rivers Potomac and Shenandoah, meeting here, burst their way through a barrier of rock. Precipitous cliffs, crowned with dark pine wood, frown over the river on each side and form the pass to the lovely Valley of the Shenandoah..." -- British traveler, 1836
2. HARPLA_120408_028.JPG: A Place in Time: Harpers Ferry: "The fact that Harpers Ferry was first and foremost an industrial village during the 19th century is not apparent in the sights, sounds or smells of the town today. Quiet streets, neat stone and brick buildings, and splendid setting... give few hints of an industrial past." -- David T. Gilbert, A Walker's Guide to Harpers Ferry, 1995 Streaming water has sculpted the land and life in this place. Striving generations have shaped the spirit of this town. A nation's struggles and the forces of nature have tested and tempered it. Today, Harpers Ferry bears the watermarks of time, and tells a wondrous tale. The meeting of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers was first a signpost on footpaths and waterways of Native Americans and pioneers. Later, settlers built a bustling hub of rail and canal traffic at the rivers' junction, and harnessed waterpower for mills and factories. War and floods devastated the growing town; scenic beauty and historic significance rescued it. Traces of Harpers Ferry's fluid history often lie hidden in the modern landscape. This exhibit offers clues to help unearth them.
3. HARPLA_120408_034.JPG: Freedmen Find Opportunity: Following the Civil War, African Americans in Harpers Ferry as elsewhere struggled against persistent prejudice and scarce jobs and food. In 1865, Nathan Brackett, a Freewill Baptist missionary from Maine, set up a mission and later a freedmen's school in Harpers Ferry. His efforts inspired John Storer to give $10,000 to help establish a school open to all regardless of race, sex, or religion. Storer College acquired buildings (originally armory supervisors' dwellings) from the federal government, and graduated its first class of eight students in 1872. The college trained teachers and also educated black children. For many years, Storer College was a vital part of Harpers Ferry community life and drew prominent visitors to its campus, among them Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois. Desegregation, loss of state funding, and dwindling enrollment, however, led to the school's closing in 1955.
4. HARPLA_120408_037.JPG: Harpers Ferry Arms a Nation: In an age of waterpower, the village of "Shenandoah Falls at Mr. Harper's Ferry" was a factory town waiting to happen. When George Washington, impressed by "its inexhaustible supply of water," chose Harpers Ferry as the site of the nation's second arms factory, the town's early fate was sealed. Waterpowered mills and factories would proliferate until the Civil War. Even after the war's destruction lessened Harpers Ferry's importance as a manufacturing center, and steam was becoming the preferred power source, water wheels and turbines were still being installed here into the early twentieth century. America's first successful use of interchangeable parts took place in Harpers Ferry. During the 1820s and 30s, John Hall perfected machinery for producing interchangeable parts for rifles, contributing not only to the success of his rifle works but to the development of the American factory system. Little evidence survives of the armory and arsenal buildings that were once a center of Harpers Ferry life. Construction began in 1799, with buildings put up hastily through the 1820s. By the 1840s and 50s, major reconstruction and reorganization were undertaken. 1859: When John Brown attempted to raid the armory in 1859, there were eighteen workshops, mills, storehouses, and offices on the grounds. 1861: Union troops set fire to the arsenal and armory shops when Virginia seceded. 1862: The U.S. Musket Factory stood in ruins, burned by both Union and Confederate troops. ca 1876-86: Ruins of the musket factory lie behind John Brown's fort (the former armory fire engine house). 1955: The National Park Service begin managing Harpers Ferry National Monument and adopted a policy of restoring the town to an appearance between 1859 and 1865. But by 1955 [???], only a monument to John Brown stands at the original site of the armory fire engine house, while a historical marker is all that remains of the armory. Meriwether Lewis: In March 1803, Lewis came to the Harpers Ferry Armory to supply the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The weapons, tools and parts from Harpers Ferry traveled almost 10,000 miles on the journey -- from the Potomac River to the Pacific Ocean and back. No other weapons, tools and parts from the Armory may have traveled as far or been as valuable as those on the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Virginius Island, 1857: By mid-century, Virginius Island, like Harpers Ferry, was an established industrial community, with a flour mill, granary, sawmill, cotton factory, cooperage, and wagon-making shop, as well as the U.S. Rifle Factory (far right).
5. HARPLA_120408_042.JPG: Traffic Arrives by Barge, Bridge, Trestle, and Tin Lizzie: Harpers Ferry's first "ferry" was probably little more than a canoe, paddled by Native Americans, or by the area's only European resident in the 1730s. Ninety years later, people and cargo still had to be ferried in and out of a growing town with a hotel, seven stores, and numerous mills and government buildings. To boost the economy, local landowners commissioned Lewis Wernag, a famous Philadelphia bridge builder, to construct the first Potomac bridge. Its opening in 1828 marked the beginning of a transportation boom at Harpers Ferry. During the 1830s two railroads and a major canal would connect Harpers Ferry with the rest of the country. By the 1920s and 30s, tourists were arriving not just by train but by "tin lizzies," or automobiles.
6. HARPLA_120408_047.JPG: Tourists Take the Scene: Harpers Ferry never wanted for admirers. Writers of the 1840s declared it "one of the most harmonious combinations of mountain, vale, and river," but the factories of this period gave little hint that it would become a resort after the Civil War -- a war that wrecked its buildings and stripped its hillsides. The shift to tourism began in the 1870s and 80s, when the B&O railroad built an amusement park and began promoting excursions that brought up to seven thousand visitors in a single day. Tourism would remain a mainstay here as automobiles became popular, the Appalachian Trail opened in 1934, and the Harpers Ferry National Monument was established in 1944 as a precursor to the present-day national historical park.
7. HARPLA_120408_051.JPG: The Rivers Give, the Rivers Take: Harpers Ferry owes its very being to the Potomac and Shenandoah. Yet even in the heyday of waterpower, the rivers were unruly -- "subject to very sudden and heavy freshets." With every high-water mark, Harpers Ferry has suffered setbacks. Post-Civil War reindustrialization was hampered again and again as floodwaters wrecked mills. In 1924, flooding forever closed the C&O Canal. Bridges swept away during the 1936 flood were not replaced until the late 1940s; ferry service had to be reintroduced. In many ways, Harpers Ferry has survived in spite of the rivers that originally brought it to life. Since Congress made Harpers Ferry a "public national memorial" in 1944, the National Park Service has reclaimed and restored many buildings damaged by floods, and identified foundations buried by sand and silt. The rivers continue to rise with regularity -- in both 1996 floods five feet of water stood in this room -- but the national park and the town endure.
8. HARPLA_120408_055.JPG: A Town Carried on History's Currents: Harpers Ferry has always ridden the rises and falls of mingled natural forces and human aims. The earliest Native American nomadic hunting camps in the region, for example, gave way to settled Indian farming villages, succeeded by an American colonial outpost, and then by a manufacturing town indebted to but wary of the rivers. Although natural resources and human goals converged here, all too often natural and manmade disasters swamped or even sank some of the town's proudest achievements. Bollman Bridge: Nothing better symbolizes the interplay of historic and natural forces at Harpers Ferry than the "Bollman" bridge. Wendell Bollman, a self-taught civil engineer, was foreman of bridges for the B&O Railroad throughout most of the 1840s. His iron-trussed railroad bridges were the first to use iron in all the main structural elements. The Bollman bridge at Harpers Ferry was the longest and most important on the B&O line. From 1870 to 1894, it carried the B&O mainline. Then, when the rail right of way was moved, the bridge continued to carry highway traffic. Damaged in the 1924 flood, it was rebuilt, only to be destroyed by the flood of 1936.
9. HARPLA_120408_068.JPG: This 1360 lb section of the Bollman bridge was retrieved in 1986 from the Potomac River, 50 years after being washed into her waters.
10. HARPLA_120408_075.JPG: A Town's People: Harpers Ferry for most of its history has been a working town. Armory and mill workers, slaves, freedmen, boardinghouse mistresses, teachers, shopkeepers, seamstresses, and students made this town home. For many of them, life was hard. Housing was in short supply; wages were generally low. After the Civil War, some whites were hostile to freed slaves, who now were competing for jobs and wages. Women and children worked long days, with few labor laws to protect them. Sanitation was poor. Indoor plumbing was uncommon well after 1900. Despite these conditions, Harpers Ferry people were resilient. Their tools and belongings bear witness to how they lived and worked in a town that was moving away from an industry-based economy to one based on tourism.
11. HARPLA_120408_080.JPG: Bed and Board: Rooms for rent were a routine part of Harpers Ferry life. As the armory's operations expanded and new industries opened, overcrowding became chronic. By the 1850s, merchants were living and renting out apartments above stores. Entrepreneurs were putting up boardinghouses to take in year-round renters, many of whom were immigrants from Germany, England, and Ireland. Many of these lodgings in Lower Town were operated by women from working-class families who needed to supplement the family income. The housekeeper was responsible for providing a clean room and meals, usually breakfast and dinner.
12. HARPLA_120408_084.JPG: Business as Usual: The economy of Harpers Ferry shifted more and more to commerce after the Civil War. When the old armory and government buildings were auctioned, enterprising citizens acquired property to develop. By the 1880s, businesses were growing in Lower Town. Harpers Ferry remained a very active town during the early decades of the twentieth century, with a bank, grocery store, gas station, restaurants, and other businesses. Eventually, however, local businesses such as the bottling plant and pulp mill failed because of national competition and repeated flooding. Once a government town in the days of the U.S. Armory and Arsenal, Harpers Ferry still has a strong government presence. Along with this park, other National Park Service offices located here also many the Appalachian Trail, providing training, and develop publications and exhibits for national parks across the nation. Today, the town's active private sector serves visitors who come to enjoy the wonders of a historic community.
13. HARPLA_120408_087.JPG: A Town's Life Partly Recaptured: Pictures of everyday life based on old sketches, newspaper articles, letters, diaries, and business records often do not tell the whole tale. Women, laborers, craftsmen, and servants may appear between the lines or not at all in written records. A careful look at the objects that people unintentionally leave behind can be revealing. Since 1959, the National Park Service has been conducting archeological research at Harpers Ferry, redrawing plans of buildings long vanished, and recovering lost items of everyday life. This work is already bringing into sharper focus the lives of Harpers Ferry's inhabitants, from Native Americans who lived here long ago, to the townspeople and tourists who shaped the town you see today.
14. HARPLA_120408_092.JPG: The Romantic View: Artists, inspired by the magnificent landscape, have drawn many idyllic renderings of Harpers Ferry. Since Thomas Jefferson came to Harpers Ferry in 1783 and later described the passage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge as "one of the most stupendous scenes in Nature," countless visitors have been drawn to Harpers Ferry to witness and record its beauty.
15. HARPLA_120408_095.JPG: The Photographic View: By the late 1800s photographers were providing realistic, if somewhat grainy, records of the streets and residents of Harpers Ferry. Today, photographers are still attracted to Harpers Ferry, perhaps for the same reasons that strike all visitors. In the town's picturesque streets and surrounding hillsides, you tap many deep sources of America's heritage. Washington, Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis, Native Americans, pioneers pushing westward, canal builders, railroaders, armory craftsmen, immigrants, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, slaves, freedmen, the townspeople of Harpers Ferry, all speak across the generations to you.
16. HARPLA_120408_099.JPG: The Documentary View: Detailed engravings recorded Harpers Ferry's development for nineteenth century readers. Journalists brought artists to sketch history in the making, engravers then rendered the sketches for publication.
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