Harpers Ferry National Historical ParkPagina 35 di 63

School House Ridge North: the farmland where the Civil War’s largest Union surrender ended

On the morning of September 15, 1862, the Union’s final surrender to Major General Jackson during the Battle of Harpers Ferry took place at School House Ridge. The battle, fought between September 13 and 15, ended in the largest surrender of Federal troops recorded in the entire Civil War. Today the ridge, in Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, is quiet farmland and woodland that the Park Service says was spared the development of the Baltimore-Washington region.

Agricultural fields seen in the distance through a break in a row of trees

The view of School House Ridge North from Bolivar Heights, looking west, in 2008, when the Park Service had recently cleared the vista to preserve the historic views. NPS photo.

Where it is

The cultural landscape lies approximately two miles west of Harpers Ferry and five miles northeast of Charles Town, in Jefferson County, West Virginia. The Park Service acquired it as three tracts between 2003 and 2005, through a partnership with the Trust for Public Land and the Civil War Preservation Trust. Harpers Ferry National Monument was established in 1944 and re-designated a national historical park in 1963.

The ridge stayed largely isolated from the industrial energy of Bolivar and Harpers Ferry because of the barrier of Bolivar Heights. Historically it was pastures, croplands and occasional orchards among woodlands, and trees with a limited understory still line the edges of wide fields.

Before the farms

By the mid-1700s permanent occupation of the area was limited. Native American villages and temporary hunting settlements dotted a route used for trade and during conflict: the Five Nations Iroquois League, Catawbas and Delaware traversed it, and Tuscarora and Shawnee built temporary bark-hut villages while hunting deer and elk. The confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers then drew European settlers, who began arriving in the 1730s, many from the north, looking for available land.

The Moler farm

The Moler family received a land grant for the property in 1784. Several generations lived there and are buried in the Moler Cemetery. Before the war the farm was cultivated by enslaved laborers. At the time of the war Daniel Moler kept horses, cows and hogs and grew hay, straw, wheat, corn and potatoes; the household included 13 enslaved people. Ten separate fields point to a large fencing system, and two of the sons fought on opposite sides in the war. The source says the ridge was probably named for a little school house the Moler children may have attended.

Large trunk of a mature Osage orange tree shading the edge of an open grassy field

Trunk of a historic Osage orange tree in a fence line running east to west on School House Ridge North, looking north, 2008. NPS photo.

Limestone foundation of a structure covered in vines

The limestone foundations of the Moler Barn, facing east, 2021. NPS photo.

Annotated 1864 map showing property boundaries, including plots owned by two Molers

Moler properties on an annotated 1864 map by Samuel H. Brown. NPS / Harpers Ferry National Historical Park Archives.

War and recovery

In 1862 the Army took timber and fence rails to build hospitals and camp fires, further changing the landscape, which around Harpers Ferry appears to have been at least partly wooded. The region recovered fairly quickly after the war. The source says the Moler farm’s reliance on enslaved labor was less established than in other former slaveholding states.

The tracts then changed hands several times, and families such as the Fritts and Ott families added farming structures. The Fritts Barn, built in 1926 and used first as a dairy barn, later housed cattle and was used until 2002. It was the first James Way barn built in West Virginia, with metal stalls and troughs for individual cows and cement floors for drainage, an innovative approach to sanitation and animal control. It burned in 2010.

Three tracts

The land was previously known as the Moler, Rau, Fritts and Ott farms, with a wooded corner that was the Jellystone Campground.

Tract	History
102-34	The Ott Farm, formerly the Fritts Farm, acquired by the Park Service in 2005. The farmer John Fritts modernized it, kept livestock on land too steep to cultivate and rented out mowing and baling to neighbors.
102-31	Part of the old Prospect Hill Farm, owned by the Moler family in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; acquired from the Civil War Preservation Trust in 2003.
102-33	The site of Jellystone Campground, a commercial resort from 1974 to 1978 with two pools, a bathhouse, tennis courts, miniature golf, a lodge and more than 300 campsites.

A gravel road through rolling terrain, with a wooden fence, parking lot and small comfort station beside it

Parking lot and comfort station at the eastern, former Jellystone, entrance, facing north, 2021. NPS photo.

The landscape is rated nationally significant under National Register criterion A, for its military history during the 1861 to 1865 war and for the agricultural landscape of the early European settlers, much of which still looks as it did.

Sources

National Park Service, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, “School House Ridge North Cultural Landscape,” https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/school-house-ridge-north-975428.htm; rewritten in hubnx’s own words.