John Brown was a man of action -- a man who would not be deterred from his mission of abolishing slavery. On October 16, 1859, he led 21 men on a raid of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry ...

John Brown's plan seemed fairly straightforward: he and his men would establish a base in the Blue Ridge Mountains from which they would assist runaway slaves and launch attacks on slaveholders.

As a vital early American town, Harpers Ferry has been the site of a number of historical events. It was a point of supply for Meriwether Lewis’s Corps of Discovery, the site of John Brown’s ...