The Pilgrimage wayside marker is on the Murphy’s Farm trail south of Harpers Ferry. It is at the end of the Murphy’s Farm Trail about 750 yards south of the trailhead parking area on Murphy Road. (39°18’28.1″N 77°45’42.6″W; map) The marker is next to the wayside markers Holy Ground and A Moving Symbol.

From the marker:

Pilgrimage

 In July 1896, members of the National League of Colored Women traveled here from Washington, D.C. and posed for their picture in front of John Brown’s Fort. The women came to pay homage to Brown and his raiders, establishing a pilgrimage tradition for other civil rights organizations.

Mary Church Terrell, the League’s first president, helped lead its fight against lynchings and racial segregation. She described the organization’s mission as: “lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go…we knock at the bar of justice asking an equal chance.”

Mary Leary Langston (third woman seated from the left) was the widow of Lewis Leary, one of John Brown’s men mortally wounded during Brown’s raid. With this journey she returned to the town where her husband died fighting for the freedom of American slaves. In the upper left is a portrait of Mary Church Terrell.

(go to the main Murphy Farm page)
(go to the main Tour the Harpers Ferry Battlefield page)