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Harpers Ferry Main • Tour the Battlefield > Lower Town 

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John Brown’s Fort is in the Lower Town of Harpers Ferry at the intersection of Shenandoah and Potomac Streets. Built to serve as the Armory’s engine house – the garage for the fire engines. It got its name when John Brown made his last stand inside at the end of his October 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.

The one story brick building was built as an “engine and guard-house” in 1848 and originally stood a short distance away at a site now marked by the Monument to John Brown’s Fort. It was the only building in the Armory complex to survive the Civil War.

In 1891 the fort was sold, taken apart, and shipped to Chicago where it was displayed near, but not part of, the Columbian Exposition. It saw only 11 visitors in 10 days, and was dismantled and stored in a vacant lot.

In 1894 the building was rescued, shipped back to Harpers Ferry free of charge by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and reassembled on the Murphy farm three miles sour of Harpers Ferry. During this time it became a place of pilgrimage for civil rights groups. In 1909 Storer College, a historically black college in Harpers Ferry, purchased the building and moved it to Camp Hill on their campus.

Storer College closed its doors in 1955, and in 1960 the National Park service moved the Fort back to the Lower Town. Relocation of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad tracks in 1894 resulted in the construction of an embankment over the original site of the building, so it now stands about 150 feet away from its original location.