Harpers Ferry, West Virginia

Harpers Ferry is a historic town in Jefferson County, West Virginia, United States, in the lower Shenandoah Valley. The population was 285 at the 2020 census. Situated at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, where the U.S. states of Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia meet, it is the easternmost town in West Virginia.

Originally named Harper's Ferry after an 18th-century ferry owner, the town lost its apostrophe in 1891 in an update by the United States Board on Geographic Names. It gained fame in 1859 when abolitionist John Brown led a raid on the Harpers Ferry Armory in a doomed effort to start a slave rebellion in Virginia and across the South. During the American Civil War, the town became the northernmost point of Confederate-controlled territory, and changed hands several times due to its strategic importance.

An antebellum manufacturing and transportation hub with a pre-war population of around 1300, the town's present economy is oriented around tourism. Its manufacturing and other significant infrastructure was largely destroyed during the war and never really recovered, as its strategic importance faded.^: 10 Harpers Ferry is home to John Brown's Fort, West Virginia's most visited tourist site; the headquarters of the Appalachian Trail, whose midpoint is nearby; the former campus of Storer College, a post-war historically black college in the upper town, and one of four national training centers of the National Park Service.

Much of the lower town, which was in ruins by the end of the Civil War and ravaged by subsequent river floods, has been rebuilt and preserved by the National Park Service.^: 15