Burned, Flooded, and Leveled

The Small Arsenal was a weapons storehouse whose foundation lay below ground after the building was destroyed in 1861. Fire baked red the top layer of clay and left twisted and partly melted muskets and parts, some fused into each other. Its slate roof, brick walls, and drafts from the cellar windows created a furnace effect that left only a shell of the building. Floods swept through that shell twice before federal troops leveled it. In 1959, one hundred years after John Brown's raid, National Park Service archaeologists first excavated the foundation, and in 2009 National Park Service specialists constructed a partial representation of the small arsenal based on archaeological evidence.

Lovettsville, Maryland · United States