Harpers Ferry’s most famous building is the John Brown Fort. Except it is not a fort. It is a fire-engine house. And it has been moved four times!

John Brown selected the compact brick building as his command center when the fiery abolitionist launched his war to end slavery on October 16, 1859. It was the first target he and his army of 18 soldiers seized just before midnight on a rainy Sunday.

Located at the entrance to the U.S. Armory Musket Factory (paralleling the Potomac River), Brown’s small army startled and scared the lone night watchman staffing the fire-engine house. “I came here from Kansas,” Brown barked, referring to his guerilla warfare exploits opposing slave settlers three years earlier in “Bleeding Kansas.” Brown then devolved his mission, without betraying his identity: “This is a Slave State. I want to free all the Negroes in this State.”

“I have possession now of the United States Armory,” declared Brown, “and if the citizens interfere with me, I must only burn the town and have blood.”

By early Monday morning, Brown had more than 40 hostages crammed inside the fire-engine house, most of them Armory men, strolling into the week’s first workday, with no idea what was happening. 

Alarms soon sounded, however, in nearby communities and in President James Buchanan’s White House. Local militia from Jefferson and Berkeley counties responded rapidly, followed by a contingent of U.S. Marines sent from Washington, D.C.

Surrounded and desperate by Monday afternoon, Brown freed most of the hostages, except for 11 leading citizens he retained as bargaining chips to negotiate his escape. Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee refused Brown’s entreaties and ordered the Marines to assault Brown’s “Fort.” The Marines used a fire ladder as a battering ram to break an opening in the sealed doors, buttressed by two fire engines. In a fight that lasted only three minutes, the Marines wounded and captured Brown, killed two of his soldiers, captured two other Fort defenders, and freed all hostages unharmed. Two of Brown’s sons—Oliver and Watson—were dead or dying on the cold brick pavers of the fire-engine house.

 Brown had failed. But his subsequent trial and execution in nearby Charles Town elevated him into martyrdom, and the “John Brown Fort” became famous.

During the ensuing Civil War, the Fort was the first sight to greet tens of thousands of United States soldiers as they first marched into the Southern Confederacy. Standing as a sentinel against slavery, the Fort inspired military bands to herald the song “John Brown’s Body,” while Northern troops venerated the Fort as a symbol of freedom.

“I recognized it from pictures then published,” rejoiced a soldier in the Second Massachusetts Infantry, the first Union regiment to enter Harpers Ferry during the Civil War. “[T]here still remains, unaltered, the several holes made through the brick walls, to enable the besieged to fire upon their assailants.” Noticing every other armory building had been burned and their shade trees scorched to death, the witness observed a peculiarity: “By some chance, the only building . . . which still remains uninjured, is the engine-house . . . and over it still waves the green trees, unhurt. Is it a prophetic emblem?”  

Following the Civil War, the John Brown Fort became Harpers Ferry’s favorite tourist attraction. So popular, in fact, that in 1891, entrepreneurs purchased the structure, dismantled it brick-by-brick, shipped it via railroad to Chicago, and reassembled it along Lake Michigan as part of the Great Columbian Exposition World Fair. Removal of the Fort from its Harpers Ferry home, however, garnered little appeal. The speculators earned $11 in admissions, bankrupting their endeavor, which had cost $60,000.

Forlorn and forsaken, the Fort fumed oblivion. Then arrived a savior—Kate Field. The renowned journalist and philanthropist had earned recognition and protection for John Brown’s burial site in upstate New York. Field raised the funds to return the Fort to Harpers Ferry, but the challenge was finding a new home. The original location had been buried under 20 feet of rock by the Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Railroad’s new alignment through Harpers Ferry.

Field leased a parcel for $1.00 at the Alexander and Mary Murphy farm on the southern tip of Bolivar Heights, about two miles from the Fort’s original site. Piece by piece, the Fort returned, reconstructed in 1895. As an inspiration to Black civil rights leaders, it became a pilgrimage site for the Second Niagara Movement conference in 1906.

The Fort was moved for a third time in 1910 to the Storer College campus. “From an ordinary engine house it has transformed into a new Cradle of Liberty,” admired the college president, Henry McDonald.

The college closed 45 years later. The National Park Service then purchased the Fort, moving it a fourth time (in 1968) to within 100 feet of its original location. The original site remains buried under the railroad embankment in Harpers Ferry National Historical Park.

Someday, it hopefully will return to its original home.