West Virginia

Harpers Ferry sits where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers come together and cut through the Blue Ridge, and it is one of the most beautiful spots in the East. Thomas Jefferson stood on a rock above the town in 1783 and later wrote that the view was worth a voyage across the Atlantic. The rock is still called Jefferson Rock.

The town became famous for something much darker. In October 1859, the abolitionist John Brown and about 20 men seized the federal armory there, hoping to arm enslaved people and start an uprising. U.S. Marines under Robert E. Lee retook the armory within 2 days. Brown was tried for treason against Virginia and hanged that December. The raid shook the country and pushed it closer to war.

When war came, Harpers Ferry was in the way. It sat on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at the border between North and South, and it changed hands several times. The armory was burned, the railroad bridge was destroyed and rebuilt again and again, and photographs from the 1860s show a battered town under the cliffs. After the war, Storer College opened there in 1867 to educate formerly enslaved people, and in 1906 the Niagara Movement, a forerunner of the NAACP, held its first meeting on American soil at the college.

West Virginia itself was born from the war. The western counties of Virginia, with few enslaved people and many Union sympathizers, broke away and became a state in 1863. The rest of the state's story in pictures is coal. Mining towns built by the companies filled the narrow valleys, and photographers from Lewis Hine in the early 1900s to the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s documented the miners, their families and their houses.

Older captions often spell the town Harper's Ferry, with an apostrophe. Federal mapmakers dropped apostrophes from most place names in the 1890s, and the modern spelling followed. The spelling in a caption is one rough clue to the age of a picture.