Camp Hill

The college grew out of a freedmen's school operating in the armoury buildings immediately after the Civil War, and was chartered in 1867 with money from John Storer, a New England philanthropist, on the condition that it admit students regardless of race or sex.

It began as a primary and normal school, training teachers, because that was the most urgent need: there were almost no Black teachers in the region and an entire population newly entitled to education. Over the following decades it added secondary and then collegiate work. Its graduates taught across West Virginia, Virginia and Maryland.

The end came from an unexpected direction. After Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, West Virginia integrated its public higher education and withdrew the appropriation that Storer depended on. The college could not survive without it and closed in 1955.

The buildings did not go. Anthony Hall, the Lockwood House, faculty houses and the grounds are here, and the National Park Service acquired the campus and put its training centre in it. A few of the exteriors carry their original names. The panels around the green explain what each building was.

Standing on the grass between them, the arithmetic is worth doing: this ground was a school for freed people within two years of the war that freed them, three hundred yards above the armoury John Brown tried to seize.

The Niagara Movement was founded in 1905 by W. E. B. Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter and others, in opposition to the accommodationist politics then dominant in Black American public life. Its founding meeting had to be held on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls because hotels on the American side would not take the delegates.

In August 1906 it met at Storer College, its first meeting on American soil. The choice of Harpers Ferry was deliberate and pointed: the delegates came to the place where John Brown had tried to end slavery by force, in the second year of an organisation demanding full civil rights without qualification.

They walked down the hill to John Brown's Fort, which stood on the Storer campus at the time, some of them barefoot, at dawn. Du Bois wrote an address at the meeting that reads today as one of the plainest statements of the case for equal citizenship made in that generation.

The Niagara Movement itself lasted only a few years, but the NAACP, founded in 1909, grew directly out of it. That line runs from this lawn.

There is no building to go into and no ticket to buy. There is a green, some panels, and a fact worth standing still for.

One of the more confusing threads in the town, and Camp Hill is where it makes sense.

The building called John Brown's Fort is the armoury's 1848 fire engine house, the only armoury building to survive the Civil War. It has been moved four times and does not stand where the raid happened.

In 1891 it was dismantled and shipped to Chicago for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, where it was a commercial failure. It came back in 1895 to a farm outside town. In 1909 it was moved onto the Storer College campus here on Camp Hill, which is why the 1906 delegates who walked to it were walking on this ground, and why a great many early photographs show it in a setting that looks nothing like the lower town.

In 1968 the National Park Service moved it down to its present site, about 150 feet from where it was originally built. The original ground now lies under a railroad embankment.

So the fort you photograph in the lower town is genuine, is not in its original position, and spent nearly sixty years up here. If a photograph in a book shows it on a lawn with a college behind it, that is Camp Hill and it is not a mistake.