Connections.

In America places can turn up that seem at first sight to have no connection. But then, on investigation, one discovers links that would have seemed unimaginable when events first unfolded. Harpers Ferry has strong links to the Ford Museum at Dearborn, Detroit; let me explain…

We were driving down to Washington, and stopped at Harpers Ferry at the extreme edge of West Virginia. It's one of those places that sounds familiar, but we weren't  quite sure why. We paid our ten dollars for State Park entrance, and boarded the shuttle bus to take us down to the river, or rather rivers, because it's here that the Potomac and Shenandoah join forces on their way to the Atlantic Ocean.

Potomac on left Shenandoah on right. The bridge put Mr Harper out of business.

Then...

...and now.

 And that's why Harpers Ferry got started. It was initially a trading route through the mountains - a cleft in the difficult terrain, where the first European explorers found an easier passage West.

It was here where they saw the potential of harvesting the power of the waters to build huge waterwheels and turbines to drive industry. At the same time a canal and railroad were built. So very  quickly this place grew from Mr Harper's ferry crossing into a powerhouse of industry.

Early days in a boom town.

And it was here that a US armoury was built; 600,000 guns were produced, using the then revolutionary method of making interchangeable parts that could be combined to produce the finished product. It seems an obvious way to do things in this day and age, but prior to Harpers Ferry Armoury and a Mr John H Hall,  who came up with the idea, every gun was made as an individual item. As he put it:

"I have succeeded in establishing methods for fabricating arms exactly alike, & with economy, by the hands of common workmen, & in such manner as to ensure a perfect observance of any established model, & to furnish in the arms themselves a complete test of their conformity to it."

It revolutionised production, and started the modern assembly line process, which of course was pioneered by Henry Ford in Detroit.

But that's not the only connection.

Britain had Wilberforce, the US had John Brown.

Because the US Armoury was stationed here, a revolutionary called John Brown, who believed that slavery should be abolished, mounted a raid. He wanted to seize the weapons, and use them to start an uprising to abolish slavery.

John's last stand was in the distant fire engine house, which used to be where the memorial now is.

It's been moved four - yes four times. The chap underneath looks as if he's holding it up.

Well it all went horribly wrong, and Brown, with his men who survived after the raid, were tried for treason at nearby Charles Town and executed. But their sacrifice was not in vain, because the whole affair laid bare the divisions in American society regarding slavery, and sowed the seeds for the Civil War that followed.

John Brown was tried and sentenced here, in Charles Town.

This all started on October 16, 1859. After the Civil War, a school was established for African Americans at Harpers Ferry, and at this school was the first meeting of the Second Niagara Movement, which later became the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP).

The school was never able to fulfil its potential, because of the segregation laws that existed.

And this is the second connection to the Ford Museum, because almost one hundred years after John Brown's raid, Rosa Parks refused to obey a bus driver's order that she give up her seat in the coloured section to a white passenger, after the white section was filled.

Rosa Parkes - nearly a hundred years after John Brown.

At the time, Parks was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. This helped fire up the civi rights movement, that finally ended segregation as recently as 1964, with the passing of the Civil Rights Act.

And where is that bus? Well it's in the Ford Museum in Detroit.

This is here because of revolutionary manufacturing - and John Brown's campaign.

Harpers Ferry still has a railway, but its heyday seems like distant history. However, while there we got chatting to a couple from Boston. The guy told us that his great grandfather owned a few hundred slaves, and lost everything after the Civil War, ending up destitute and homeless in Chicago. The way he told the story, we weren't sure whether he wanted us to feel sorry for him.

That brought home to us how America's short history still echos in the present.

You Don't Have to be Mad to Work Here...

I heard about some chap in the UK who pretended to be mad to get off a crime he'd committed - some reasonably violent attack. He was committed, and over twenty years later he's still in Broadmoor. If he'd pleaded guilty and taken his punishment he'd have been out years ago. He says the problem is that he can't prove he's not mad. Whatever he does is seen in the context of madness... We reckon there was a lot of that here...

Our RV is on the left for scale.

We visited a disused lunatic asylum in Weston WV, as you do. They started to build it just as the American Civil War started in 1863, and was finished a few years after hostilities ceased. It's on the Western side of the Allergheny mountains, as the population was spreading out from the East.

Difficult to differentiate this from the Penitentiary.

Interestingly when it was started, stone was hauled from a quarry twelve miles away by horse and cart. After the Civil War, when work was resumed, masons from Europe were employed.

The Europeans obviously...

Their first question was: "Why bring it from twelve miles away when there's perfectly good stone on the banks of the river six hundred yards away?"

...brought their own sense of humour.

Nowadays the river's a lot wider here…

Some people spent over 65 years here.

It is a huge building, nearly a quarter of a mile long. It was built for just 250 patients, which shows just how enlightened things were in those days. In the 1950s it was seriously overcrowded with about 2,500 patients being treated there. It was closed in 1994.

Must have been a pleasant place to start with.

But the downside in the late 1800s were the reasons for committal. Just some of those on record are as follows:

 

Asthma
Bad Whisky
Death of Sons in War
Deserted by Husband
Domestic Trouble
Egotism

Epileptic Fits
Fighting Fire
Greediness
Grief
Hard Study
Intemperance and Business Trouble
Laziness

Novel Reading
Over Study of Religion
Political Excitement
Superstition
Women Trouble

These are only a select few, but even so nowadays the vast majority of the population would be banged up inside if we used the same criteria.

Looks like any front door - almost.

It was built according to the theories of  Thomas Story Kirkbride, who espoused healthy living with lots of fresh air, grass to walk on and free movement wherever possible. This of course was difficult for the most violent patients,  who had to be restrained before the "chemical cosh", Thorazine, was invented.

No tools were used in the damaging of this door.

Here was the most atmospheric part of the hospital, where murders were committed. But as the inmates were already declared insane, the law couldn't touch them. One patient in particular knew this well, and dispatched a couple of fellow inmates with impunity - the details too grisly to tell here.

This was used to tie patients hands above the bed after Electro Shock Therapy.

Walter Freeman, pioneer of the infamous transorbital lobotomy also practised his "art" here, and performed 150 operations on one visit. I won't go into details as it's a bit gruesome, but you can look it up here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Jackson_Freeman_II

if you're interested. It's a good example of how the "experts", when left unquestioned,  can wreak havoc. After all, it was the "experts" of the time who came up with that list of reasons for committal…

There was an art gallery at the end of the tour, and here there was a chance for the inmates to have a say. 

It was a poignant reminder of why this huge edifice was built in the first place, and for me the most moving.

Freedom was just outside.

Indians! Scores of Them!

We were cruising the back roads around Avella, west of Washington PA, when we stopped at a pull-in to stretch our legs and enjoy the waters of a small stream we'd spotted. As we walked down to the stream we spotted someone we thought was paddling. As we got closer we saw that he was in fact, a Native American.

He didn't know we were there at first.

We'd heard about this tribe, the Shysoo. They've managed to avoid all contact with settlers up to the present day, helped by a little known Act of Congress passed in 1974, banning all contact between US citizens and the natives. To see one is a very rare event.

He told us to go away at first.

They live in the densely wooded hills of South West Pennsylvania and the North of West Virginia - the Mountain State. They still live their old way of live, totally uncontaminated by modern American culture.

He could see we were impressed with his method of catching fish.

When he spotted us, he obviously wanted to disappear into the forest, but that would have meant leaving the fish he'd caught behind. He was using the ancient technique of poisoning them with the juice from crushed walnuts washed into the water. It seemed very effective, even working on the crayfish under the stones.

He showed us how he made a fishing line from sinew.

As we're not American, we figured we could approach him. We managed to convince him we were friendly, by offering him some Pecan Butter ice cream from our freezer on the RV. Then we discovered he spoke a form of Shysoo.  This meant we could understand him better than most of the modern Americans we meet.

Some Crayfish he'd caught. We told him they wouldn't go well with the ice cream.

We told him we were from New Zealand, as we didn't want to get him angry about all those broken British treaties; after all, he had a stone axe that looked rather fierce.

Because we weren't American, he agreed to take us to his village nearby and introduce us to some of this tribe. What an honour!

The first we met was his wife - we think. (We had difficulty understanding family references.)

His family were very surprised to see us!

She showed us how she made cord and what plants were useful for this purpose It was also amazing to see just how strong the tendons from a deer are; you can catch fish with it tied to a bone hook.

 What also impressed us was how labour intensive the whole process of making cord was. But as she said;

"What else am I going to do at night? We don't have any TV in our huts, or McDonalds to go to." (I may have missed something in the translation.)

 Then her neighbour showed us some bags and baskets she'd made. Apparently a lot of the detailing on the traditional Medicine Bag  is made from porcupine quills. The bag is deep, so it can be hung over a belt without losing the contents.

She also showed us her corn platting that she used to make baskets to keep dry stuff in, but they're not very good when they get wet, as they rot easily. So she'd made a basket from very long pine needles that had been imported from the South. These can get wet with impunity, which is useful if you're draining the water out of an acorn cake.

She was a cheerful soul who looked surprisingly like us.

Whilst all this was going on, one of the guys who'd been trapping animals came across to show us his latest triumph. He'd got the hide of a large red deer, and he was preparing it for treatment.

He seemed happy in his job.

I believe they also celebrate Haloween.

He handed it over to another even scarier chap who made a stone scraper whilst we watched. This was imported obsidian, which must have cost a fair amount of beaver skins. It was fascinating to see him create a sharp useable tool in the space of ten minutes. Then he got to work on the hide.

After getting rid of most of the meat and fat...

...he made a scraper while we watched. Fantastic!

We mooched around for a while, poking our noses into the huts, and seeing what was for dinner.

The hut was very smoky - so they all lie down when at home.

They then showed us an old archeological site that had been opened up, called Meadowcroft. After much work digging, cataloguing, drawing and radio-carbon dating, this showed that this part of the world has been inhabited for the last 16,000 years.

This is where their ancestors stopped for short holidays.

Our friend pointed out to us that if they'd just asked him, he could have told them all this and saved them a lot of bother.

We promised to send them a photo - but later realised we didn't know where they'll be living.

We left them all with a tub of Peanut Brittle with Caramel Crunch ice cream. On reflection it may not have been a good idea…

Banged Up Without Mercy.

The West Virginian State Penitentiary was reckoned a tough place to be.

It was built in 1866 using prison labour. There was a quarry nearby, and all the old part of the prison was hewn from the rock, dressed by hand, and built into the edifice we see today. It took the prisoners ten years to do it.

This building was where the prison started. 100 men stayed here while building the big place.

Until the fifties, the Governor had to live on the job, and the top two stories were his home. There he lived and raised a family. Heaven only knows what the children made of it all.

This is what the Governor's family looked down on. The other side faced The Mound.

It was enlarged in the fifties when three new exterior walls were added. Astonishingly that took thirty years. (Hmm. I wonder why that was.)

This is the surrounding wall that took so long to build.

The toilet block on the right has no walls. They were removed after an inmate was murdered there. 

In the early days it was almost completely self sufficient. They milked their own cows, raised their own chickens and planted their own crops. Of course nowadays that's deemed unacceptable for some reason.

A chance to communicate with your loved ones.

It was decommissioned in 1995, the 650 prisoners were re-located, and since then tours have been available to the public.

This air conditioned cafeteria was a concession to the prisoners after one riot.

The black inmates sat on the far side - out of choice. The wall with the mural separated the guards.

Many cooking utensils were smuggled out of the kitchen.

The American penal system isn't the most pleasant in the world. There's a popular reluctance to spend money on infrastructure or supplies - the tradeoff is usually put as: "money for criminals in prisons versus money spent on hospitals or schools." So conditions have tended to be harsh and uncompromising.

And of course, that's what us visitors were all really eager to see.

This is the route to the exercise yard for the worst behaved inmates, in the most secure part of the gaol.

Some of the toughest prisoners in the prison were incarcerated here, and many were 'lifers'; men who had used up their three strikes and were out. There was no chance of parole for a lot of them, so they had nothing to lose. And a man with nothing to lose is a dangerous man.

And this was the view for 23 hours a day.

There were over nine hundred - yes nine hundred - murders committed within these walls over the years, only two of which were prison warders. There was a constant fight for supremacy amongst the various gangs, who divided themselves into ethnic groups. Ebony and ivory were definitely not living in harmony.

They segregated themselves at mealtimes, and used improvised prison-made weapons to attack each other. Their ingenuity was incredible. (If only they'd used some of it to make an honest living.)

The cells could be decorated to the inmate's taste though.

Well I suppose you have to have something to think about.

The harsh conditions they were subjected to resulted in two riots, when hostages were taken. As you may well imagine, the prison warders held at those times were given a pretty hard time, but the inmates also used their periods of power to settle old scores. Of course there were rarely any witnesses to the murders.

I don't think I'd do very well in here.

At present one out of every 142 American citizens are in prison, and the death penalty still exists in many states. Within three years of their release, 67% of former prisoners are rearrested and 52% are re-incarcerated. America spends around 50 billion dollars a year locking people up.

Only two people escaped from this prison and got clean away. That was about sixty years ago.

Compare that to prisons in Norway. There, the ratio of prison inmates to the country’s overall population roughly ten times lower than that of the United States, and only about 20 percent of those imprisoned in Norway commit a repeat crime that sends them back to prison.

Yet they seem to have a much 'cushier' time of it.

It seems counter intuitive, but what's better value for money?

(Or maybe Norwegian prisoners are just big softies.)

Cross the red line over to the wide section, and you could be shot. Dead.

It was a sobering tour and it was difficult to imagine surviving in such a bleak place.

When sentenced to death the prisoner had a choice. The Chair or hanging.

They overwhelmingly chose to hang.

But on a lighter note, as it's supposedly the most haunted prison in America, the Penitentiary is also open for night tours. Visitors are taken in the dark to a cell and locked in. There, unknown to them, someone is already sitting invisible in the shadows dressed in black. After a while he speaks.

We were told that there are often changes of underwear required.

 

This lady was a warden here until it closed. She says the clientele are a lot nicer now.

Read more: U.S. Prisons Overcrowded and Violent, Recidivism High — Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0933722.html#ixzz27IfCTzcY

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