John Brown's Body

STATES VISITED: West Virginia / Virginia / Maryland / Pennsylvania

We hauled the teenagers out of bed today at 8:30am, probably the earliest they've had to get up all summer. But sorry, kids, this ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around. We had hikes to hike and historic landmarks to mark, and time was a-wasting. (Must be something about being in West Virginia that gets me talking like Pearl Bodine.)

First off -- well, after the Froot Loops and muffins from the motel's breakfast bar -- there were battlefields to tramp around, in this case the Murphy Farm, a.k.a. the Chambers Farm, as it was known in 1862 when the Confederates set up their cannon in the hayfields to rout the Union forces. Stonewall Jackson's finest hour, apparently. The view of the Shenandoah valley from the farm is truly spectacular:

That's looking upriver towards Maryland. West Virginia was still Virginia in 1862, which just confuses all this history even more. It's pretty amazing to think that these soldiers hauled those heavy guns up these steep ravines from the Shenandoah River; I could barely drag my handbag uphill (though god knows how much I've got in that purse). The Union forces never expected they'd be coming from the south -- never underestimate the power of surprise.



The Union troops were a little farther north, in the town of Bolivar (it used to be called Mud Fort before the townsfolk changed the name to capitalize on the romantic image of Simon Bolivar, the "George Washington of South America"). Here's the Union troops' defensive position, looking south towards the Blue Ridge:

Walking around old battlefields may not be everybody's cup of tea, but we get a kick out of it. It's a good excuse for an hour's hike, anyway.

This is really is a gorgeous part of the country, I have to say. I'm sure my pictures don't do it justice.

And then of course there's the obligatory staring-down-the-cannon-barrel shot. For some reason this absolutely never gets old.

It really was ironic to see those Union cannons trained on that little gap in the trees, blindly pointing the other direction from the farm we'd just visited, where A.P. Hill and his men (not to mention his own big guns) were massing all the while, behind the Union flank. At the end of this battle, over 12,000 U.S. troops surrendered to Stonewall Jackson, a record that was not surpassed until World War II. Then apparently the Confederate troops withdrew from Harper's Ferry a few months later and the Union took it over again anyway. Go figure.

I can't claim to be much of an expert on this history, mind you; I'm only telling you what we learned this morning from Park Ranger David Fox, who delivered a genuinely impressive 45-minute overview of Harper's Ferry's colorful past, beginning back with George Washington, who surveyed the land as a young Virginia surveyor, and Thomas Jefferson, who sat on a rock here exulting over the view of the Potomac gap.

Here is a picture of my son Tom sitting on that selfsame rock, ignoring the view while he is texting friends on his cell phone:

Washington was the one who decreed that one of the two U.S. armories should be built here, where there were local iron and lumber for raw materials, and water power to run the gun factory works. If Washington hadn't located the armory here, then abolitionist firebrand John Brown wouldn't have come here to try to swipe guns to arm all the escaped slaves he was planning to help to freedom.

This John Brown stuff is the aspect of Harper's Ferry history that got me the most intrigued. It sure is a bizarre story. And where there's a bizarre story, what better way to tell it than a cheesy wax museum? Don't get me wrong, the John Brown Wax Museum is perfectly respectable as wax museums go, but all wax museums are by definition inherently cheesy, aren't they? So of course we had to visit it. Here's a fuzzy photo of my favorite tableau in the place, the denouement of Brown's crazy raid on the federal armory. Note: Brown is the kneeling figure in the tan coat, cradling in his lap his dying son who he dragged into this escapade.
I get the idea that Brown was, to put it delicately, a bleeding nut case. His goals may have been perfectly admirable, but his methods were highly suspect. In the end, he got half of his 21 men killed (did he really think he could pull off this raid with just 21 men?) and got himself hung for treason. He was tried, all right, but it doesn't look to me like this could possibly have been a fair trial -- it took place just a few weeks after the raid, when Brown himself was still suffering from wounds received in the skirmish. I'll bet it was a zoo, the 19th-century version of the OJ trial. On the other hand, Brown's lunatic raid helped to ignite the Civil War, which eventually did end slavery, so maybe he knew what he was doing after all.

Harper's Ferry has been basically a national park since the 1940s; only about 300 hundred people live here now, most of who seem to be running gift shops or selling ice cream. Nice gift shops, mind you, and delicious ice cream. It's a cool little town and we enjoyed poking around. A lot of the shops are gussied up to look like they did in the 1850s, but right now they've just got fake displays in the windows. I'd like it even better if more of them were fitted up with repro merchandise and costumed shopkeepers. You know the drill -- the fake print shop, the fake blacksmith's forge, the fake general store. I love historic restorations. I love costumed interpreters too, but they were in short supply today. We saw exactly 3 women in long skirts and bonnets and one Civil War soldier walking around for the benefit of the educational programs. Maybe there would have been more if we'd come on a weekend. I'll bet they've got loads of them organized for John Brown's 150th anniversary later this year.


Oh, and one other cool thing about Harper's Ferry -- it's the mid-point of the Appalachian Trail. We ran into at least a handful of hikers with their walking sticks and backpacks, though they didn't look grubby enough to have come all the way up from Georgia or down from Maine. After reading Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, I'm ready for every Appalachian Trail hiker to be mud-coated and wild-haired and stinky.

Mid-afternoon, we bid Harper's Ferry adieu and headed on toward Wheeling, West Virginia. The road we drove on, I-68, running from Cumberland MD to Wheeling, was called the National Freeway -- apparently, in 1806 Thomas Jefferson ordered the first federal road to be built along this route, linking the Potomac and Ohio rivers. (This fact I picked up from the great book I'm reading right now, Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure by Matthew Algeo -- more on that tomorrow.) It was a beautiful highway with hardly any cars on it -- mostly just a handful of 18-wheelers laboring up these long inclines and huffing around the curves. I was driving so I didn't get to soak up the long blue-misted mountain views, and the other folks in the car were snoozing so they didn't see them either. So much for seeing America...