"Dark With Bloody Memory": The Odyssey of the John Brown Fort Across America, Memory and Place

This thesis investigates American historical memory, and place studies. The work focuses on the Harpers Ferry fire engine house, known as the John Brown Fort, and its history. The historical focus shows the mobile nature of the building as a place in American history and as a symbolic place in the memory of the past. This thesis proposes a new term to the “language of place” studies, that being “memory making” which is a phrase defined by the author as “a process by which varying groups or individuals impact the physical place, history, interpretation, understanding, and importantly the meaning of a site or event based on their usage of the place, and how it therefore impacts us when visiting.” Through this lens, the thesis tracks the history of the Fort through its moves and meanings to the World’s Fair of 1893, and back to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia where it moved two more times. Chapters one and two examine its use as a piece of memorial commerce in 1893, to a tool for self-promotion and a mode of looking into the importance of women, or women’s groups in historic preservation in the 19th century. The third chapter looks at its intersection of memory and place with civil rights and race. Here, memory making is used to explain the symbolic importance of the Fort, especially in regard to early Civil Rights groups and leaders, namely the Niagara Movement and W.E.B. DuBois.