Jefferson's Rock: Worth a Voyage Across the Atlantic
Near Harpers Ferry, West Virginia
On October twenty-fifth, seventeen eighty-three, Thomas Jefferson stood on a rocky outcrop above the lower town and looked down at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. What he saw moved him enough to produce one of the most celebrated landscape descriptions in American writing. In his book Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson wrote: On your right comes up the Shenandoah, having ranged along the foot of the mountain a hundred miles to seek a vent.
On your left approaches the Patowmac, in quest of a passage also. In the moment of their junction they rush together against the mountain, rend it asunder, and pass off to the sea. He concluded that the view was worth a voyage across the Atlantic.
The rock where Jefferson stood has borne his name ever since. It sits above town along the Appalachian Trail, a stack of Harpers shale piled in rough layers on the hillside, with the wide river scene laid out below. Jefferson county, created from a portion of Berkeley County in eighteen oh one, was named after him.
Jefferson did not stop at admiring the view. He used it to theorize about geological history, suggesting that the rivers had torn a passage through the mountain. The geology he imagined was partly mistaken but the view he described has changed little since seventeen eighty-three.
