John Brown's Fort

This monument marks where John Brown's Fort once stood. The little brick building was put up in eighteen forty-eight as a fire engine and guard house for the federal armory at Harpers Ferry. In October of eighteen fifty-nine, the abolitionist John Brown seized the armory hoping to spark an uprising against slavery, and made his last stand inside this engine house. Cornered, he was captured here and hanged that December in nearby Charles Town.

The fort had a strange afterlife. In eighteen ninety-one it was taken apart and shipped to Chicago for the World's Fair, then dismantled again. In eighteen ninety-five the railroad raised this obelisk over the original site. The building was returned to the Harpers Ferry area after the fair and, in nineteen sixty-eight, the National Park Service moved it to its present spot, about a hundred and fifty feet from where it began.