Free previewStop 6 of Harpers Ferry Walking Tour: John Brown's Fort to Jefferson Rock
A College Built from Armory Houses
You're on Camp Hill now, on Fillmore Street, standing among the buildings of what was Storer College. Look back the way you came, toward the rivers. The view you just admired from Jefferson Rock is the same one this campus has from its near-clifftop perch, where the Shenandoah meets the Potomac below the Blue Ridge. For almost 90 years, Black students studied with that view out the window.
This story starts in 1865, right after the Civil War. The armory down in Lower Town was wrecked and never rebuilt. Up here on the higher ground, though, one sturdy and nearly empty house was still standing. People called it Lockwood House, after a Union general who had stayed there briefly.
A Baptist minister from Maine, the Reverend Nathan Cook Brackett, needed a base for teaching freed people across the Shenandoah Valley.
That's the opening. The rest plays at stop 6 of Harpers Ferry Walking Tour: John Brown's Fort to Jefferson Rock (3 min in all). Unlock the tour to hear it all, or try stop 1 free first.
