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has also appeared in: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/31/scot-faulkner-commemoration-conundrum/
Harpers
Ferry National Historical Park is being celebrated with a Quarter featuring the
fire house used by John Brown during his history changing October 1859 raid.
The
image on the coin is an accurate depiction of the current fire house and its
location in the lower town of Harpers Ferry.
However, the fire house and its location are very different from the
actual building and setting that ignited America’s Civil War.
This is
the challenge for historians and Park personnel. In his famous book, “Sacred Ground; Americans
and their Battlefields”, Edward Tabor Linenthal, provides examples of how we
change our history by the ways we preserve and honor it.
Linenthal
discusses placing monuments on the Gettysburg Battlefield, and removing the
upper decks of the Battleship Arizona to create the iconic memorial at Pearl
Harbor. In these and other cases, our
desire to honor the touch stones of America ends their purity. These changes turn history into icons that become
more relatable and impactful to future generations.
John
Brown’s fire house is the perfect example of turning history into
iconography.
The
fire house John Brown and his followers retreated to on the Harpers Ferry
Armory grounds was a very different building than the one we honor.
The belfry,
the most iconic aspect of the fire house, did not exist at the time of the raid. Drawings and lithographs from the period show
no belfry or bell. The cupola was added
after the raid. No bell was ever placed
in the tower. Civil War era photos show
the tower, but never the bell. Without
the cupola, the fire house was more a shed for fire engines. It was referred to
as the “engine house” prior to the raid.
The bell
was promoted as the “second most famous bell in America” by Union veterans and
early 20th Century historians as they assumed John Brown was going
to ring the bell to summon rebelling slaves to his cause. Therefore, the Fire
House Bell was tied to ushering in Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” linking it
to the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.
The
bell only rang for work shifts in a tower at the Hall Rifle Works, along the
Shenandoah River near the current Route 340 Bridge. Markings on the bell reference 1841. This was
the bell the 13th Massachusetts Regiment removed and hid near
Williamsport, Maryland after the Battle of Antietam in September 1862. In 1892, these veterans recovered the bell
from its hiding place while attending an encampment of the Grand Army of the
Republic (GAR). They brought it to their
GAR Club House in Marlborough, Massachusetts.
Eventually, the bell ended its travels by being installed in its own
bell tower in Marlborough’s town park.
The town reveres the bell to this day.
The
fire house itself witnessed extensive travels and changes. The Federal Armory was destroyed during the
Civil War. The Fire House, nicked named
“John Brown’s Fort”, became just another derelict building on the Armory
grounds.
In 1891
the “Fort” was sold for display at the World’s Columbian Exposition in
Chicago. It was taken apart and
transported to the World’s Fair. In the
process, many bricks were removed as mementos.
The result was shrinking the building’s size by a third. The Fort was then rebuilt backwards. The
office was originally on the right side.
It is now on the left.
After
the Fair, the Fort remained in Chicago because there was no home for it. The
B&O Railroad had built a new set of tracks across the Armory grounds. The Fort’s original site was now under a
twenty-foot high embankment.
Eventually,
the Murphy Family arranged for the Fort to be relocated on their farm in
Harpers Ferry. The farm was known as the
Chambers Farm, which was the site of A.P. Hill’s nighttime flank march that
forced the surrender of the Union garrison on September 15, 1862.
The
Fort sat on the Murphy/Chambers field.
Commemorative plaques were installed on the walls inside the fire engine
garage.
On
August 17, 1906, the Fort was the site of another historic moment. It was visited as a pilgrimage by Delegates
from the Second Niagara Movement, the early version of the NAACP, to honor its
role in Emancipation. Additional plaques
were added to its walls.
Three
years later, Storer College , the first African American school for higher
learning, bought the Fort and moved it to their campus on Camp Hill. There it remained a campus focal point until
the College’s closure and acquisition by the National Park Service. In 1968, the Fort was moved to its present
location just a hundred feet from its original foundation, marked by a small
obelisk atop the B&O railroad embankment.
Buy the
coin. Visit the Fort. Honor its role in
America’s industrial revolution, abolitionist movement, Civil War, and African
American history. Also, ponder the
building’s journey from fact to legend, function to icon.
[Scot Faulkner is
President of Friends of Harpers Ferry National Historical Park]
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