Harpers Ferry Jefferson West Virginia United States

Construction begins on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal along the east bank of the Potomac River.

George Washington, as the chief advocate of using waterways to connect the Eastern Seaboard to the Great Lakes and Ohio River, had had a large part in its creation, having founded the Potowmac Company in 1785 to make improvements to the Potomac River in order to improve its navigability.

The Potowmack Company had built a number of skirting canals around the major falls including the Patowmack Canal in Virginia.

When completed, it allowed boats and rafts to float downstream towards Georgetown.

Going upstream was a bit harder.

Slim boats could be slowly poled upriver.

The completion of the Erie Canal worried southern traders that their business might be threatened by the Northern canal; plans for a canal linking the Ohio and Chesapeake had been drawn up as early as 1820.

In 1824, the holdings of the Potowmack Company had been ceded to the Chesapeake and Ohio Company.

Benjamin Wright, formerly Chief Engineer of the Erie Canal, had been named Chief Engineer of this new effort, and construction begins with a groundbreaking ceremony on July 4, 1828 by President John Quincy Adams.

The narrow strip of available land along the Potomac River from Point of Rocks to Harpers Ferry causes a legal battle between the C&O Canal and the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad in 1828 as both seek to exclude the other from its use.

John Brown raids the federal armory in Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in an unsuccessful bid to spark a general slave rebellion on October 16, 1859.

Brown had established a headquarters in a rented farmhouse in Maryland, across the Potomac from Harpers Ferry in the summer of 1859.

On the night of October 16, he and an armed band of five blacks and sixteen whites, including three of his sons, quickly seize the armory and round up some sixty leading men of the area as hostages.

Brown takes this desperate action in the hope that escaped slaves will join his rebellion, forming an “army of emancipation” with which to liberate their fellow slaves.

Instead of retreating to the mountains with a supply of arms, the abolitionists fortify themselves in the armory's engine room.

Brown and his men had resisted attacks by the local militia throughout the next day and night, but on the following morning he surrenders to a small force of U.S. Marines who, in little more than an hour, have broken in and overpowered him. (The leader of the force is Robert E. Lee, who had received these orders while on leave at Arlington to straighten out the entangled affairs of his late father-in-law.)

Brown himself is wounded, and ten of his followers (including two sons) have been killed.

Union forces defeat the Confederates at South Mountain and Crampton's Gap, Maryland, on September 14, but ...

...lose Harper's Ferry, with its eleven thousand-man garrison and supplies, to General Jackson.