Harper's Ferry

Two weekends ago, Heather and I went with our close friends Ken and Nichole to spend a day in the historical little town of Harper's Ferry, which is in the western part of Virginia, also known by some as the state of West Virginia (that was for you, Tys). Heather did some amazing research beforehand, so we knew some of the more interesting points of the town and fun things to do. We had a great day.

We started out with a nice little hike up a few of the hills surrounding Harper's Ferry. Heather set a pretty brisk pace, but we somehow managed to keep up. Here you see everyone pointing to Harper's Ferry below. It was a great vantage point.

Next, we bought some incredibly delicious homemade kettle corn and cinnamon roasted almonds and drove into town and. After Kenny found an awesome parking spot, we started walking around. Harper's Ferry is famous because George Washington picked the site to be a federal arsenal. As a result, gun factories lined the river in this city. A man named John Brown attacked this city in 1859 and held it for a little while before Robert E. Lee (a colonel at the time) led a detachment of marines and overcame Brown's band. Brown apparently raided city and in hopes of taking the weapons, sparking an armed slave revolt, and overthrowing slavery in the US. Ironic thing is, the only person killed by Brown's group during his raid was a free black man who wouldn't abandon his post. I never did quite figure that one out.

Anyway, below is a picture where Brown made his last stand before his death. It was a pretty emotional place (not really).

I took the next pic from a lovely spot overlooking the river. It was close to the very spot where Thomas Jefferson in 1783 said the following: "The passage of the Patowmac (yes, he spelled it funny; how's a guy supposed to know how to pronounce this stupid word with all these funny spellings!) through the Blue Ridge is perhaps one of the most stupendous scenes in Nature... This scene is worth a voyage across the Atlantic."

We certainly thought that the scenery was nice, but realized that Mr. Jefferson was definitely prone to exaggeration.

We ate dinner in this pleasant little cafe.

Our highlight of the day was a ghost tour that we did at night. The tour originated with a woman who moved to the town in the late 70's to open a small cafe. Not long after moving there, some weird things started happening in her cafe (I won't go into the details; you'll have to take the tour to find out what happened). She started asking around about the history of her cafe (which was built before the Civil War), and discovered that many people had had similar experiences in other town buildings, some long before she had showed up. So she compiled all of the stories into a book and gave tours around the city at night relaying these stories. She recently stopped doing it 5 or so years ago, but this nice gentleman pictured below picked up her baton and now runs the ghost tour. It was a lot of fun, and a great way to end the day.