Case Study

HARPERS FERRY NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK offers a full buffet of interpretive food for thought. It is a dramatic and historic confluence, literally and figuratively, situated where the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers meet, at an important junction in the early years of the nation, when rivers were highways. Harpers Ferry was a 19th century gun-making factory town, where the abolitionist insurrectionist John Brown took over the federal arsenal in 1859, and where the Civil War, which followed, destroyed the town and created a new free state—West Virginia.

Harpers Ferry is also where the National Park Service descended into the ruins, in the 1950s, to reconstruct the town as a multi-leveled interpretive proving ground. This ongoing project continues to this day, guided by the programs and designs of the Harpers Ferry Center, the Park Service’s national design campus, also located in the park, on the hill above town.

Entering the Park
Visitors turning off the highway into the park soon encounter the entrance sign. The sign is made of wood, and is hand carved, evoking a rustic professionalism, with stylized green hills and blue rivers, converging on a black and white pointy abstraction, perhaps a church steeple, just around the bend. The NPS Arrowhead trademark, a feature of all NPS entrance signs, makes it official.

Just past the sign is the vehicle entrance booth, where visitors must purchase or display an entry pass, generally $20 per vehicle. Unless they happen to visit on one of the five days of the year when the park entrance fee is waived.

Since it is possible to drive or walk into the park on the paths and public streets around it, without paying admission, visitation is principally managed by restricting parking on park property (a tactic employed at parks across the nation, suggesting another meaning for the National Park Service). This visitor center and lot opened in 1990, to provide remote parking with shuttle service to the park, as parking at Lower Town, where the main features of the park are located, is problematic. 

Beyond the booth is a parking lot where visitors can select from nearly a thousand parking spaces, and head to the Visitor Center Plaza. The visitor plaza has a four-sided upright sign kiosk, a type often found outside visitor centers, to provide initial orientation. The kiosk describes and depicts park features, and has an annotated bird’s-eye view map graphic, which, importantly, shows your current location, at the Visitor Center Plaza. The two primary geographic areas of the park are also described: the open landscapes of the Civil War Battlefields and Trails, and the built up Lower Town.

The Park Service provides a self-guided Battlefield Driving Tour to five of these Civil War sites, described and located on the main map of the park’s Unigrid brochure. Trails meander past Civil War cannons and empty mowed fields, where General Stonewall Jackson battled Union forces in 1862. Harpers Ferry changed hands more than a half-dozen times over the course of the war. These sites are tranquil and largely unvisited today.

The small visitor center building serves as a point of contact for visitors to ask questions, and to pick up maps. Inside is a diorama of the park, focusing on the Lower Town and Camp Hill areas. Also at the plaza is a public restroom, perhaps the most important feature of any park gateway.

A covered area at the plaza provides shade and shelter while waiting for the shuttle bus, which arrives and departs every 15 minutes or so. Visitors can also walk the mile and a half from the visitor center to Lower Town, or drive there themselves on other roads, but most of the 300,000 annual visitors to the park ride the bus. A recorded audio program on the bus welcomes people to the park, and includes a folk song titled “Take Me Back to Harpers Ferry.”

On arrival at Lower Town, buses unload at a bus stop with an upright sign that provides more orientation. Visitors generally head into the heart of the park along Shenandoah Street—into one the densest interpretive environments in the entire park system.

A Stroll Down Shenandoah Street
The buildings along this street were in ruins when the park opened as a National Monument in the 1950s, and their restoration has been one of the Park Service’s main projects here since that time.

The cluster of buildings on the south side of the street have housed the introductory interpretive displays for most of the park’s existence. Currently the Master Armorer’s House, at the end of the row, has the main introductory exhibit, the first of several multi-room exhibits in the restored buildings of Lower Town.

The introductory exhibit explores six principal interpretive themes for Harpers Ferry National Historical Park: Natural Heritage; Transportation; Industry; African-American History; John Brown’s Raid; and the Civil War. The displays consist of two-dimensional images and text panels, enhanced with three-dimensional artifacts in protective acrylic boxes, mounted on the panels. There is also a detailed diorama of Harpers Ferry, and additional rooms used for occasional presentations by Park Service staff and volunteers.

Building A, at the other end of the row of buildings along the south side of Shenandoah Street, also has introductory exhibits and displays, and as the closest building to the bus stop, is often one of the first buildings to be visited.

Inside is an exhibit called A Place In Time, which resembles the exhibit in the Master Armorer’s House in some ways, using two-dimensional panels embedded with three-dimensional artifacts, and serving as a general overview of Harpers Ferry, but without the structure of the six interpretive categories.

A Place In Time offers another take on the same place—the armory, transportation, tourism, rivers, “freedmen find opportunity”—as well as different ways of seeing Harpers Ferry’s past: the documentary view, the romantic view, and the photographic view. The display, produced under the direction of the Harpers Ferry Center’s Division of Exhibits, also includes an introductory film.

Across the street is a building once known as the Stagecoach Inn, which was the park visitor center in the 1960s, and is now the park’s bookshop and gift shop. Next to it is another partially restored building, with a window display and sign saying Stonebrakers Bakery. Inside are the public restrooms for this part of the park.

Next door to that is a building with old-looking signs for a grocer and shoemaker, but inside instead is an exhibit area called the Industry Museum. Here displays are focused on the industrial history of Harpers Ferry, where water from both the Shenandoah River and the Potomac River were diverted into canals that powered factories.

George Washington named Harpers Ferry and Springfield, Massachusetts, as the sites of the first federal arsenals, and until the Civil War, manufacturing rifles was the main industry here. The Industry Museum describes how breech-loading rifles were produced at Harpers Ferry using interchangeable parts, which reduced the need for skilled craftsmen, and helped usher in the era of factory mass production.

The displays in one end of the room are image and text panels, with artifacts in clear acrylic boxes inside grey veneered cabinetry. At the other end is a full-scale replica of a portion of a gunsmith shop, with wooden work benches and belt-driven cast iron lathes and tooling machines.

Continuing down Shenandoah Street, the next of the NPS restored buildings contains a historic recreation of a clothing shop, one of a few buildings along Shenandoah Street where exteriors and interiors were made to look as they might have been in the mid-1800s. These displays are static full-scale dioramas, viewable from just inside the door, but otherwise un-enterable. Low-profile interpretive signs help describe and animate the scene.

Another partially restored building on the row contains the Reading an Old Building exhibit. Inside, a walkway suspended over the rough floor guides visitors past a battery of low-profile interpretive signs, describing elements of the scene. The exhibit describes the forensic, archeological process for reading physical evidence of old buildings, in order to understand their past.

Starting in the 1950s, this process was used by the Park Service throughout Harpers Ferry, in their efforts to restore buildings to the 1859–1865 period—the years from the John Brown Raid through the Civil War, mandated to be the park’s main focus.

Over the years, buildings along Shenandoah Street and adjacent streets, owned by the Park Service, and extant in the mid 1860s, were stabilized, preserved, rehabilitated, or restored. If the building was built later, such as in the Victorian period, which many were, they were demolished. The exhibit continues out the back door deeper into the historic jumble of building walls in the steep hillside, peeling back the layers of time in order to reconstruct them in the present.

Back outside, on Shenandoah Street, interpretive plaques show photographic views of the same place, in different times. Images show this street when it was flooded, as it often was, badly in 1889, 1896, 1902, 1924, 1936, 1942, 1972, 1985, and 1996, as indicated on a flood level chart on the side of Building A, giving visitors a deep sensation of immersion, definitively in the past, and likely into the future.

The community of Harpers Ferry once extended far below the flood chart on Shenandoah Street, up the Shenandoah River shore, and into an area known as Virginius and Halls Islands, with housing for workers, a rifle factory, and mills for cotton, flour and pulp.

In the late 18th century, the Shenandoah Canal was constructed here for cargo boats to bypass the rapids at the end of the river. The canal was part of the Potowmack Canal system, an extensive commercial enterprise to expedite regional and national trade, founded by founding father George Washington himself. In the early 1800s a power canal was added to run the mills here.

Though floods were especially hard on this lower part of Lower Town, it persisted until the last operating mill closed in 1935. Its remains were washed downstream in a flood a year later.

The ruins and overgrown wooded land along the riverbank and canals has been cleaned up by the Park Service, and this part of the park is an architectural cemetery, with former building sites outlined by stones, like chalk lines drawn around departed bodies. Some romantically reconstructed and stabilized ruins of waterways remain, marked with descriptive plaques, like clues in an interpretive game board, used to reconstruct, in the mind, what was once here, on the ground.

The Point
Shenandoah Street ends where the rivers and rail lines converge, at the Point, a low bluff overlooking the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers. It is a place to look out from, and at. For visitors to come together, look together, and see together. The Point has a variety of signs, starting with the classic low-profile tilted sign with an annotated bird’s-eye-view map graphic, mounted to the railing at the most advantageous part of the overlook.

Nearby is a row of four smaller low-profile signs of an earlier vintage. Each describes a different aspect of the significance of this point of confluence as a corridor, with successions of canals and railways that came through here, connecting the East Coast with the Ohio River Valley, enabling the early nation to push westward.

Another different type of sign at the Point is one in a series installed at Harpers Ferry to commemorate the Lewis and Clark expedition, a minor parallel sub-narrative within the park. Though Lewis and Clark’s famous 1804-1806 trek across the West happened far from here, starting in St. Louis and heading up the Missouri River, the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry provided provisions and guns for the trip.

The Point also has a four-sided eye-height upright sign, typically used for orientation and wayfinding, as it is here. One panel is similar to a panel located at the visitor center, at the other end of the park, and shows the location of the visitor center, as well as the visitor’s current location. Another panel, with a more zoomed-in map, is similar to the one at the shuttle bus station at Lower Town, and shows the visitor’s location relative to that.

The sign is located along a pathway, at what park designers call a decision point, where visitors may benefit from additional information to help them decide which way to go, and how to spend their time. One decision that can be made at this point is whether to visit the Maryland side of the confluence, by walking along the old railroad bridge.

The rail bridge is one of two crossing the river here. It provides a view of the Point itself—an overlook of the overlook—and provides views of the ruins of the first railroad bridge over the confluence, built in 1836, and later destroyed in the Civil War.

The grounds of Harpers Ferry National Historical Park extend into the Maryland side of the river, and into the hills of Maryland Heights where a 1.5-mile hike through the woods leads to Overlook Cliff, with a view over the confluence, a few hundred feet above the railway tunnel.

The trail along the Maryland shore of the Potomac here is multi-jurisdictional, part of three other National Park units: the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park; the Appalachian National Scenic Trail; and the Potomac Heritage National Scenic Trail. A stroll here is truly a compounded park experience.

Back to Harpers Ferry, over the bridge, leads immediately to a curious anomaly within the park, a gated area where the public is excluded. The map labels this as a dangerous active railroad area. The site, centrally located at a focal point for the town, is maintained as a functional location for CSX Railroad, and is a kind of a hole in the park itself.

Beyond the brief interruption of this forbidden zone, the abandoned tracks atop the old railroad right of way head to the train station, an old B&O Railroad facility that dates back to 1894. The tracks in front of the station are still active, part of the mainline for CSX freight, whose double-stacked shipping container cars thunder past the old platform—like a freight train. Amtrak comes through town, too, and makes a stop at the station.

The Park Service purchased the station from CSX in 2001, and restored it. The station was valued for its parking lot, the only NPS controlled public parking area in Lower Town. Rangers manage access to the park through this back door portal, and make sure park and parking fees have been paid.

The Armory 
Adjacent to the train station is a mowed area full of interpretive plaques that help to conjure up the original federal armory. The grassy area covers just a small portion of the factory complex site. Some of it lies under the raised ground of the railroad embankment, constructed in the 1890s to protect the railway from flooding. More of the factory complex lies in the overgrowth upstream, beyond the current scripted space of the park, lying in wait for interpretive cultivation in the future.

Stairs take visitors down the railroad berm, to the interpretive field below, where low-profile signage explains what lies beneath the green lawn, and the extensive archeology that has taken place there. Signs explain how a power canal was constructed along the river, starting more than a mile upstream, providing a 22-foot power head to run machinery in the factories.

Mandated into existence by George Washington in 1795, the armory and its arsenal buildings were intentionally destroyed and burned by the retreating Union Army in 1861, in the early days of the Civil War, to keep the weapons from falling into the hands of the Confederacy.

The only remaining structure from the original arsenal is the former firehouse, which has become the central focus of the park, as it was inside this structure that the abolitionist John Brown held out during his famous raid on the arsenal, in 1859, and where he was finally captured, 36 hours later.

John Brown
Across from the firehouse, and the end of Shenandoah Street, is the John Brown Museum, the park’s largest indoor exhibit environment, at the most prominent location in Harpers Ferry.

Inside visitors are first confronted with a large painting of John Brown, looking like a biblical Noah, guiding his rebels through the stormy torments of slavery and the Civil War. Beyond is a labyrinth of dioramas, artifacts, and displays, exploring his legacy.

The narrative arc of the displays are anchored by three primary themes, with introductory videos. The first theme describes John Brown’s life, and the conditions of slavery before his raid. One large panel dramatically provides a history of slavery in America, and another explores the fundamental injustices of slavery. Others discuss the early days of John Brown, and what compelled him to become who he was.

The second section centers on the raid itself, and displays part of the armory gate through which he and his partners engaged in gunfire with the soldiers and townspeople who were trying to stop them.

The third section of the narrative is about the events following the raid, and includes a video viewing arrangement set up like a courtroom, where the man, John Brown, and his legacy, are on trial, on a screen. Artifacts on display include pieces of the scaffold where he was hung. Other panels consider the connections of the raid to the Civil War, which began a few years later. Other panels examine the effect the raid had on civil rights battles after the war, and the raid in the context of American protest and democracy overall.

John Brown remains a controversial figure to many, and the displays navigate a complex political balance, which extends to the Heyward Shepherd memorial, outside the museum, erected to honor the railroad porter who was the first person killed in the raid.

The Harpers Ferry Center designed most of the exhibits in the John Brown Museum, starting in 1972, and parts of it seem to date back to that era, with small cathode ray tubes touchscreens recessed in canted cabinetry, barely legible, or out of service. They are well aware that updates are needed, and have plans to address it, when resources are available.

The final moments of John Brown’s life played out beyond Harpers Ferry, including his trial, which was held in the courthouse at Charles Town, a few miles away. A mile from the courthouse is the field where John Brown was hanged. A large house was built on the site a few years later, by Colonel John T. Gibson, the commander of the militiamen who guarded John Brown from potential rescuers during the two months between the trial and his execution.

John Brown’s body was sent to his family’s farm in North Elba, New York, near Lake Placid, where it was buried. The site is now a New York State Park. Closer to home, in the community of Bolivar, at Harpers Ferry, there is a John Brown escape room attraction, and a John Brown wax museum on High Street in Lower Town. A reproduction of the John Brown Fort is used as a coffee shop at a nearby KOA campground, where Civil War re-enactors often congregate.

The “real” John Brown Fort, next to the John Brown Museum, is a well-traveled reconstruction. It has been reassembled at least three times, starting in 1891, when it was disassembled and moved from its original location, near the gate of the armory, and put back together as a display at the 1883 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

After a few weeks on display there, where it is said to have been viewed by less than a dozen people, it sat in storage for another two years, before a local farmer bought it for $900, and shipped the pieces to his farm outside of Harpers Ferry, where it was reconstructed.

After 14 years there, the structure was disassembled again, and reconstructed at Storer College, on top of the hill at Harpers Ferry. It remained there until 1968, when it was moved to its current location, but this time in one piece, on a truck.

This is not the original location of the fort, however. While the fort was out traveling around, its original location was buried under a 14-foot-high railroad roadbed, built to protect the railway from the frequent floods of Lower Town.

The tracks have since been abandoned, and the site, across the street, is now topped with a stone monument inscribed with the text “John Browns Fort.” Next to it is a plaque that describes the monument, and the fort, 150 feet away from where it was, but close enough, for now.

Higher into Lower Town
Several other partially restored Park Service buildings are clustered around the John Brown Museum, each housing display environments expanding on Harpers Ferry Park themes.

Next to the John Brown Museum, on High Street, is a building containing exhibits about Storer College, a historically Black college that was established on the hill above town after the Civil War, and the Niagara Movement, a Black civil rights organization led by W.E.B. Du Bois and others, that held an important meeting at Storer College in 1906, and later evolved into the NAACP.

Across the street from that is a building with a sign above the door that says African-American History. In 2023, this exhibit was closed for renovation. Next to it is the Civil War Museum, in a three-story Park Service building, also closed for renovation in 2023.

Across the street from that is a building with a sign that says “Defeat and Victory: The 1862 Battle of Harpers Ferry.” Inside, a diorama models the battlefields around Harpers Ferry that were engaged during the Civil War, and wall panels with text, maps, and images go through the battles sequentially. It’s a story that is interpreted on site at full scale, for visitors that take the Self-Guiding Battlefield Driving Tour.

On the other side of the block, on Potomac Street, is an enterable display inside the first floor of a partially restored building, with a sign above the door that says Meriwether Lewis at Harpers Ferry. Inside is an exhibit about Meriwether Lewis’ 1803 visit to Harpers Ferry, to stock up on supplies for the trip he would lead to “discover” the West, as mandated by Thomas Jefferson.

The exhibit provides a list of these provisions, including 15 rifles made at the armory. The exhibit also talks about the collapsible iron frame boat that he designed and commissioned from the armory. Lewis spent many days testing it on the river, at the armory’s boat ramp. Unfortunately the boat quickly sank when they set it up on the Missouri River, and they went on the journey without it.

The Meriwether Lewis exhibit building is on the property line that runs down Hog Street, and divides one Harpers Ferry from another. On one side is Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, where the land and buildings are owned by the Park Service, and on the other side of the line, to the north, is the actual functioning town of Harpers Ferry. In the town, land and buildings are privately owned, are not limited by having to be made before 1867, and are developed into restaurants, gift shops, and inns, serving tourists. The line is abrupt, and is also visible as a change of asphalt along High Street.

Up the Stone Steps
Slicing through town, perpendicular to Potomac Street and High Street are the Stone Steps, connecting the river level Lower Town to the high grounds of Harpers Ferry, known as Camp Hill. The ancient-looking steps were an important public path, connecting the parts of the town built on steep slopes and terraces.

The steps pass by a row of structures that loom above town, along a narrow dead-end street called Public Way, built above the floods that destroyed much of Lower Town. At one end is Harper House, the oldest building in town. The house, with a commanding view of the community and confluence, was built by the founder of the town, Robert Harper, who operated the ferry that gave the name to the place, Harpers Ferry. He started building the house in the 1750s, but didn’t finish it until 1782.

Harper died the year after the house was finished, and after that it was used as a tavern and public house. Thomas Jefferson likely stayed there when he visited Harpers Ferry in 1783, and George Washington, too, in 1785. It was one of the first structures preserved by the National Park Service in the 1950s, back when the park was still just a National Monument.

Connected to Harper House is the row of buildings on Public Way that were built by Harper’s descendants in the early 1800s. Known as Marmion Row, the buildings contain offices and apartments for the Park Service, and are not open to the public.

A little further up the Stone Steps is St. Peters Church, a prominent feature of the skyline. The Roman Catholic Church dates back to 1833, and served the Irish immigrants who worked at the armory. Further up the steps is the Episcopal Church, St. Johns, built in 1852, which was abandoned in 1895, and became a romantic ruin.

Above it is the principal attraction on the steps, Jefferson Rock. Thomas Jefferson’s visit to the rock in 1783 inspired him to declare in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, that the scene was “worth a voyage across the Atlantic,” a quote often repeated in references to Harpers Ferry. John Quincy Adams, however, after visiting the rock in 1834, said “there is not much of the sublime in the scene, and those who first see it after reading Mr. Jefferson’s description are usually disappointed.”

After two centuries of continued carving and vandalism, including being painted by teenagers in 2004, the Park Service now prohibits climbing on the rock.

Above the rock, the trail summits at Camp Hill, the upper part of Harpers Ferry, through the hilltop cemetery, where the best view is left to the departed.

Commanding Views
The commanding view of Camp Hill was the chosen perch for the armory’s chief administrators and, later, Civil War generals, who occupied mansions here. Today the mansions are owned by the National Park Service. The first one, Lockwood House, is undergoing slow renovations, and is not open. Near it is Brackett House, currently used by Park Service administrators, and closed to the public. The third, Morrell House, is now the National Historical Park’s headquarters, and is not open to the public either.

The edge of the Park continues along the crest of Camp Hill, along Freemont Street. One block north, on Washington Street, is the Appalachian Trail Visitor Center, which is also the headquarters for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the independent agency that is the primary manager and advocate of the trail.

Said to be the world’s longest hiking-only footpath, more than 3,000 people attempt to hike the 2,200-mile-long trail from end to end, annually, connecting Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine. Three million people visit portions of the trail every year in some way.

The Appalachian Trail Conservancy was established in 1925, 12 years before the trail was even completed, and continues to work with local, state, and federal partners to manage the trail. The Park Service does not own the trail itself, but is one of its largest management partners, along with the US Forest Service, and considers the Appalachian Trail an official NPS unit, one of its 33 National Scenic Trails and Trail Systems.

As the trail passes through the region from the south, it follows the wooded slope along the Shenandoah River, then merges with the Stone Steps, and descends to Lower Town, passing by John Brown’s Fort, and crossing the Potomac over the old train bridge at the Point.

A half-mile spur of the trail connects the Appalachian Trail Visitor Center to the main trail as it passes through Camp Hill. The spur enters the grounds of the former campus of Storer College, now owned by the National Park Service. It passes the Park Service’s Mather Training Center, which occupies the largest of the former college buildings. Then the Appalachian Trail enters a shaded plaza, at the front entrance of the Park Service’s Interpretive Design Center, the entity responsible for NPS designs implemented across the nation, including, and especially, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. ♦