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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
HARPRR_120408_19.JPG: Mayor Fontaine Beckham Memorial Room:
This room is dedicated to the memory of Harpers Ferry Mayor Fontaine Beckham, killed on October 17, 1859, during the John Brown Raid on the Harpers Ferry Federal Armory and Arsenal.
Mayor Beckham was a well-liked, distinguished lawyer, magistrate, entrepreneur and public servant in Jefferson County, Virginia. For twenty five years he was the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad agent until his untimely death.
The Events Unfolded as Follows:
Harpers Ferry Mayor Fontaine Beckham's day began innocuously. He dressed and proceeded down High Street. The commotion in the Town had aroused him. Citizens urged him to do something. A bullet that mortally wounded his friend and railroad baggage master, Heyward Shepherd, caused him to proceed to the B&O Railroad station where the tall free black man lay dying on the blood-soaked loading platform. The mayor, concerned for the safety of his town and citizens, periodically checked on his dying co-worker. Shepherd was the first person to die in the Raid. Beckham, unarmed, was thought to be a sniper by Edwin Coppoc. Beckham had initially confined himself to the B&O ticket office. However, he climbed the railroad trestle and looked around the town water tank. Coppoc fired his Sharp's rifle from the engine house (John Brown's fort). A bullet entered Beckham's brain ending his life. John Brown would later be charged with his murder.
Mayor Beckham is buried in Edge Hill Cemetery in Charles Town, West Virginia ...
October 10, 2009
John Brown Raid Sesquicentennial
HARPRR_120408_37.JPG: All Aboard: The Baltimore & Ohio Harpers Ferry Railroad Station:
The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, conceived in the 1820s by the merchants of Baltimore as a way to capture a share of the burgeoning domestic trade with the west, reached Harpers Ferry in December 1836. The rumble of the train and the blast of the locomotive horn have echoed against the mountains for generations.
The Harpers Ferry Station symbolizes the growth and change of transportation at this riverside town. Constructed in 1894, the depot has been altered many times throughout the years. Designed by Architect E. Francis Baldwin, its original location overlooked the scenic confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers; however in 1931, as part of a series of railroad improvements, the station was moved to its current location. Designed in an age when it was deemed appropriate to shield women from the male population, the original station had two waiting rooms -- the women's with the fireplace and the men's on the other side of the ticket office.
The B&O promoted Harpers Ferry as a tourist spot. The town was a regular destination and departure point for numerous tourist excursion trains from 1880 to the 1930s. People flocked to Harpers Ferry for history, reunions, political conventions, religious retreats, hiking trips, and other special occasions. The B&O even purchased Brynes Island in the Potomac River, renamed it Island Park and created a summer resort with pavilions, a dining tent, refreshment stands, swings, and skating rink, merry-go-round, and Ferris wheel. In 1910 the Farmer's Advocate reported a crowd of 5,000 to 6,000 employees and family members of the B&O attended the company picnic on Island Park.
The 1930s saw a steady decline in rail passengers as the use of automobiles continued to rise. The "golden age" of railroading was fading from the American scene. The Harpers Ferry Station remained active, but the structure fell into disrepair and was named to the Top 10 Most Endangered Stations in America in 1999. Following four decades of on again, off again negotiation, the station and grounds of the US Armory were transferred to the National Park Service in 2001 and restoration of the station began. The Harpers Ferry Station has stood a sentinel to the community and its history -- a gateway to historic Harpers Ferry.
AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Wikipedia Description: Harpers Ferry Train Station
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Harpers Ferry Train Station is a railway station in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, United States. It is currently served by Amtrak's Capitol Limited as well as MARC commuter service. Built by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the station is part of the Harpers Ferry Historic District.
It is a wooden frame Victorian style building, dating from 1889. It sits on buried foundations of original Harpers Ferry armory buildings.
In 2007, the station was rededicated following a $2.2 million renovation, which included restoration of the station's tower.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
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