How Robert Harper Made His Ferry

The town of Harpers Ferry owes its name and its existence to a single practical decision made by a Pennsylvania millwright in the seventeen forties. Robert Harper was born in seventeen eighteen and made his living building houses and mills. In seventeen forty-seven he was traveling through Maryland on his way to build a meeting house for a Quaker congregation in the Shenandoah Valley when he came to the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers.

What he noticed was not the scenery but the business. Someone was already running a rough ferry crossing at the spot where the two rivers met and where a natural gap in the Blue Ridge Mountains opened the route westward. Harper paid thirty guineas to buy out the man running the informal operation and acquire his squatter's rights.

In seventeen fifty-one Harper purchased one hundred and twenty-six acres of the surrounding land from Lord Fairfax, the great colonial landowner whose holdings covered much of northern Virginia. In seventeen sixty-one the Virginia General Assembly granted Harper the legal right to operate a ferry across the Potomac. And in seventeen sixty-three the legislature formally established the town, naming it Shenandoah Falls at Mister Harper's Ferry, a name that eventually shortened to the two words that stuck.

Robert Harper died in October of seventeen eighty-two and is buried in Harper Cemetery, a few steps from the crossing he chose thirty-five years before.