I have just returned from spending a quantity of time in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. This town is about an hour outside of Washington, DC, and was founded by Robert Harper in 1751. He had been sent to the Shenandoah Valley in 1747 to erect a Quaker meeting house there, and was impressed enough by the potential industrial and mercantile powers of the merging of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers to purchase 125 acres of land at their juncture.

There have since been 13 floods during which the rivers have dumped over 20 feet of water into Harper's Ferry, most recently in 1996. The largest documented flood was in 1936, when the waters crested at 36.5 feet. Also, the town changed hands between the Union and Confederate armies eight times during the Civil War - the town is in a deep valley and not easily defended. These two factors absolutely devastated both the industrial and civilian life that had been established there.

I am a post-apocalyptic girl, and I love ruins. LOVE them. Abandoned, overgrown, falling apart whatevers totally suck me in. Harper's Ferry is full of them, both Civil War-era and more current. Harper's Ferry proper is now a national park, and you can move about freely in the ruins of the old buildings - you get a real sense of the effects of the war here, even more so than on the battlefields (which are really just big, open fields and not as interesting to me - we did go to Antietam), especially on just normal, everyday folk who were trying to make a living and raise families.

And speaking of that, I have included some photos of a more modern abandoned house, also in Harper's Ferry, for contrast. There are an amazing amount of these in the area - whereas they are building large numbers of new "McMansions" for the influx of city dwellers who have decided to sprawl out into the rural-ish outer burbs, these older buildings attest to the hardships of the Harper's Ferry natives. There is a great amount of money moving into this area now, and the more seasoned residents are pretty old-school about not liking the townhouses, strip malls, and city folk that come with it.