Harpers Ferry Buildings and Other Details

Here's a few photos of some of the architectural details of Harper's Ferry. The sign above was also part of the Harper's Ferry scene -- remember I was there during the psychedelic 1960's! (For other "detail" pictures, click here.)

Harpers Ferry National Historical Park

Harper's Ferry is located at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers in West Virginia. Directly across the Potomac is state of Maryland, and across the Shenandoah is the state of Virginia.

Harper's Ferry is most famous for John Brown's raid in 1859. Since a Federal arsenal was located here, Brown and his men (including Harry Flashman) hoped to seize the arsenal weapons and ultimately arm slaves for a rebellion to obtain their freedom. They held the town for 36 hours until they were either killed or captured by U.S. Marines commanded by Robert E. Lee.

Over the course of the Civil War, the town changed hands several times, and the armory was destroyed. Now the lower part of the town by the rivers is part of the National Park while the upper area is privately owned and features shops that cater mostly to tourists.

While working there, our quarters were the entire second floor of the Master Armorer's House (shorter building facing the street in the left hand photo below) which was built in the 1850's. The first floor was a museum displaying the firearms produced at Harper's Ferry while it was a Federal armory.

Yosemite National Park Interlude

Just to break up my progression through the parks where I lived and worked, here are some current Yosemite photographs. At the end of last October, I attended an employee reunion in Yosemite Valley. The Fall colors were even better than I remembered from when I worked there. So, for a couple of days, I took a couple hundred digital pictures, and here are a few of the best.



































For a few more photographs of this wonderful Yosemite season, click here. Just left click on any of these pictures to see the photo in a larger size.

Muir Woods National Monument

I was stationed at Muir Woods for three years, and WOW actually had my job title changed from Administrative Assistant to the exulted title of Administrative OFFICER.

I have some slides of the park, but they haven't been scanned to CD as yet. The company I've been using for scanning, DigMyPics.com, suffered a terrible fire back in May, and I was lucky as I didn't have any slides with them at the time. They had some 100,000 slides and negatives when the fire took place, and have spent the last several months salvaging what images they could save from their servers. They did such a fine job of scanning for me that I've waited until they were back in business again (which seems to have taken place in the past couple of weeks), so now I can continue have my slides scanned.

In the meantime, I will feature one photograph from Muir Woods in this post. While I was working there, two different movie companies were allowed to film some scenes in the Woods. The first film was "Petulia" starring George C. Scott, and he was there for the filming. The film director was Richard Lester. The second film was "Finian's Rainbow" starring Fred Astaire and Petula Clark, and was directed by Francis Ford Coppola (yes, even he did have some flops). All these people came to the Muir Woods "set", and the one photo here is of yours truly enjoying a moment with Petula Clark.

Point Lobos Interlude - More rocks and sand

Tonto National Monument - Part 2

By far, the nicest aspect of living at Tonto was being in the Arizona-Sonoran desert. Having seen many, many, "nature" programs on PBS over the years, I'm convinced this desert is the most beautiful in the world with its wonderful variety of flora and fauna including the iconic giant Saguaro cactus.