The Point at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. I love all the elusive triangles in this shot; there may be three different states in view. 

Here the rolling green farms of Maryland suddenly give way to the sharp, triangular, granite mountains of the Blue Ridge, with roaring rapids at the bottom of steep scree ravines. You are in West Virginia. Wow.

Here “the point” is literal: the point of confluence of the Potomac on the left, and the Shenandoah on the right. You can trace the confluence in the ice floes. 

Thomas Jefferson’s father Peter claimed much of this land. TJ himself famously sat upon a natural megalith, Jefferson’s Rock, looking down on The Point of Confluence, and contemplating the State of Virginia. Pilgrims and Appalachian Trail hikers have whittled the poor thing down quite a bit.

The Point lies in Jefferson County.

Harper’s Ferry is the point of departure, historically speaking, from Virginia’s eighteenth century, and its emergence into the nineteenth, an age of intensifying industrial power and the concentration of conflicts. Manifest Destiny rose at this Point, as did the Lewis and Clark expedition.

At this Point, the technology race for the West was lost by natural and animal power – waterfalls, watermills, canoes, canals, Conestogas, and mule-drawn barges – and won by railroads, coal mining, steel smelting, tunnel blasting and bridge building. Ruins of all these things lie around everywhere.

Here was the point that must be held, between Secessionist sentiment in Tidewater and Piedmont Virginia, and Unionist sentiment in the Blue Ridge counties of West Virginia. And it was The Point that would be held, in the Battle of Harper’s Ferry, with massive 100-pound guns emplaced on the mountains you see, raining hot iron down on the town that still clings to the sharp scree above the Point.

Where Chris stands stood the Federal Arsenal, the whole point of the city of Harper’s Ferry. It was appointed by President Washington in 1790 at the point of departure to the West. He knew this, for he had surveyed the area thoroughly years earlier, and invested in land nearby.

To seize this arsenal, and arm Virginia’s slaves in Abolitionist rebellion, was the shocking point of John Brown’s raid in 1859.

Chris and I visited Harper’s Ferry on the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. We knew some of the history, but had no idea of the role played by the city as a  shrine for black Americans. The inspiring point of pilgrimage centers around John Brown’s Fort, which has been moved from the Point back into town, presumably for protection from the floods that finally doomed Harper’s Ferry as a living city. Brown’s Fort has toured the country and served as an exhibit at the Columbian World’s Fair in Chicago. It, and Harper’s Ferry have been lovingly visited by black patriots from Reconstruction, through Jim Crow, and on in to the Civil Rights era. Storer College, W.E.B. du Bois and the Niagara movement, the Freedman’s Bureau, the Underground Railroad, Native American displacement, the Appalachian Trail, all come to The Point at Harper’s Ferry. 

Here the National Park Service does a superb job of interpreting tough but inspiring stories of slavery, resistance, territorial expansion, and landscape technology.

It made quite a trip, that’s the point.