Day Trips from Harpers Ferry — and Harpers Ferry as One

If you do one thing with the second half of your day, do this one, and do it knowing why the two places belong together.

On 15 September 1862, roughly 12,500 Union soldiers surrendered on Bolivar Heights behind Harpers Ferry — commonly cited as the largest surrender of United States troops until Bataan in 1942. Two days later, fifteen or so miles north at Sharpsburg, the two armies met along Antietam Creek. The National Park Service's own figure is 23,000 men killed, wounded or missing in twelve hours. It remains the bloodiest single day in American history. It ended the Confederate invasion of the North, and it gave Lincoln the victory he had been waiting for to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

What you see there is very different from Harpers Ferry. Antietam is open farmland with a driving route through it, which means it is the easier of the two for anybody who found the stone steps hard work. The visitor center looks out over Bloody Lane. Dunker Church stands white against the treeline. Burnside Bridge, three stone arches over the creek, is the single most photographed thing on the field. And the national cemetery holds the Private Soldier Monument above rows of Union graves.

Practical points. Entry is charged separately from Harpers Ferry: $20 per private vehicle, $15 per motorcycle or $10 per person at the time of writing, valid three consecutive days, under-16s free, and this park does not take cash either. Allow two to three hours to do it properly, more if you walk any of it.

If you are anywhere near here in early December, the Memorial Illumination places 23,000 candles across the battlefield, one for every casualty. It is the most affecting thing in this region and it costs nothing to drive through.

Eight miles west, and the piece of the John Brown story that almost nobody goes to see.

Brown and his men seized the federal armory at Harpers Ferry on the night of 16 October 1859. The raid failed within thirty-six hours, US Marines under Robert E. Lee stormed the fire engine house, and Brown was taken alive. He was not tried at Harpers Ferry. He was tried in the Jefferson County courthouse at Charles Town, convicted, and hanged there on 2 December 1859. Seeing the courthouse and the town after seeing the engine house closes a loop that most visitors leave open, and it takes twenty minutes to get there.

It is a working county seat rather than a museum town — a courthouse, a main street, ordinary shops and ordinary traffic, which is itself instructive after a morning in a preserved national park. Ask locally before you plan around any specific building's opening hours, because a working courthouse keeps courthouse hours.

Charles Town has a second life as well: the thoroughbred track and casino on its edge draw a completely different crowd, and it is the reason there is more accommodation and more open kitchens here on a Tuesday night than in Harpers Ferry itself. If you are staying two nights in the area and want somewhere to eat after eight, this is generally the answer.

The drive out on US 340 is straightforward and mostly quick. The same road is the region's commuter artery, so the return leg on a weekday evening is slower than the map suggests.

North on the Potomac, chartered in 1762, and the oldest town in West Virginia. Shepherdstown is what Harpers Ferry would be if it were not a national park: a real high street with a bookshop, a university, kitchens that are open in the evening, and students in them.

That is precisely why it pairs so well. A day of armory ruins, engine houses and battlefield is heavy going, and finishing it on German Street with a proper meal changes the shape of the whole trip. It sits roughly between Harpers Ferry and Antietam, which makes the natural circuit obvious: battlefield in the afternoon, Shepherdstown in the early evening, back down the river road in the dark.

There is history here too, and it is continuous with the rest. The armies crossed the Potomac at the ford here in the retreat from Antietam, and the fighting that followed on 19 and 20 September 1862 was the last act of that campaign. Shepherd University's presence keeps the town alive rather than embalmed.

Two practical notes. It is a small town, so check opening hours rather than assuming, particularly out of the university term. And the river road between here and Harpers Ferry is a narrow, pretty, slow drive along the Potomac — lovely in daylight, tedious in the dark if you are in a hurry.