In justifying the necessity of a National Park System, Teddy Roosevelt stressed the need for “recreation in the production of good citizenship.” With that in mind, it feels fitting that this year, the National Park Service (NPS) has declared Juneteenth a park-wide free entry day.
Juneteenth, often called America’s “second Independence Day,” recalls and commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union troops delivered news of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to the slaves of Galveston Bay. Though the Proclamation was issued on New Years’ Day, 1863, it was largely symbolic until the annihilation of the Confederacy two years later. Texas, the westernmost member state, was the final holdout at the dusk of the Confederacy, so its liberation (two months after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox) marked the true date of post-war independence. A year later, the 14th Amendment was passed (and ratified in 1868), and the foundation of the “good citizenship” Roosevelt coveted was laid nationwide.
This month, just three years after its installment as a federal holiday, Juneteenth will serve as a free entry day for NPS sites nationwide. While a host of parks already offer free admission, some carry ticket prices hefty enough to discourage casual visitors. Among them are national titans like Acadia (ME), Yosemite (CA) and Zion (UT), but also hidden gems and parks that demand recognition on a day as significant as Juneteenth. Perhaps chief among them is Harpers Ferry, a three-thousand acre paradise which once hosted one of the bloodiest events in American history.
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From North America’s largest coral reef to a voyage north of the Arctic CircleSituated in West Virginia’s Eastern panhandle, Harpers Ferry was first proposed as a memorial to John Brown, a radical abolitionist with a propensity for righteous violence. In 1859, Brown seized the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, his ultimate aim being a nationwide slave revolt. Though he was captured and hanged shortly thereafter, his raid and his final words echoed across history: “The crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with blood.” In the aftermath of the “John Brown Raid,” Northerners were invigorated and Lincoln was elected president. Jefferson Davis, then a senator, and later the Confederacy’s president, claimed simply that he was prepared for Brown’s “sea of blood.” “John Brown, and a thousand John Browns, can invade us, and the Government will not protect us,” he stated in December, 1859, so “we […] will protect ourselves out of the Union, if we cannot protect [slavery] in the Union.”
The federal armory was decimated in the Civil War and never reconstructed. Poetically, that which does remain includes “John Brown’s Fort,” the tiny firehouse in which he resisted Lee’s Marines until the moment of his capture. That bastion lays in the heart of what is now called Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, five miles of wilderness and Shenandoah River that Thomas Jefferson once called “one of the most stupendous scenes in nature.” If you’re in the area, I suggest you make the trip. After all, it’s free.
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