Day 4 - Our Civil War Journey begins

We picked up a rental car the night before and left early for Harper's Ferry.

Harpers Ferry's is a very important town in the history of the Civil War.


It was the place that John Brown raided the arsenal in 1859. Brown attacked and captured several buildings; he hoped to use the captured weapons to initiate a slave uprising throughout the South. He was caught and hang but the affair brought the slave issue to the attention of the nation and was a major catalyst for the start of the Civil War.



Harper's Ferry is a major rail junction and was a strategically important location on the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley. The town changed hands 8 times during the war. It was also the scene for the largest surrender of US military personnel until the World War 2.

Harper's Ferry today is a National Historical Park and is administered by the National Park Service.

We drove into the town following the GPS then realised that they had a large car park outside the town with a bus service around some of the sites and back to town. This was quite good as it meant that there were not piles of cars parked everywhere.

There were a number of civil war re-enactors around the town both union soldiers and civilians. They staged little scenes that represented everyday life in a military held town. This added so much to the story of the town.


The enactors were very friendly and knowledgeable and were very happy to talk about the civil war and their own views etc.

I loved Harper’s Ferry and would like to come back and explore it more some day.



Next we programmed the rental cars GPS to take us to Antietam and ended up down some back and beyond country road, major fail. Lucky Roger had his own GPS which worked fine.

We went into Sharpsburg for lunch then out to the visitors centre and to our horror found that the park was closing early at 3:00 (in 10 minutes). I was very annoyed about this as they did not say that the park was closing early for a concert on their website.

This meant that we could not visit the exhibits in the centre or the tower down the valley overlooking Bloody lane. So we quickly looked through the shop and went to visit Burnside's bridge.

The battlefield is again well looked after and maintained. There are Statues, monuments and signs everywhere telling the story of the battle at different times.

After driving around the sites that we could we headed back to the Hotel and dinner at the Red Lobster where I had Lobster and chardonnay for dinner, yum.