Edge Hill Cemetery

Edge Hill Cemetery contains the graves of Fontaine Beckham and John Avis, two participants in the saga of John Brown’s Raid in October 1859. Beckham, then the mayor of Harpers Ferry, was one of four civilian casualties. Although John Brown freed no slaves by capturing the United States Arsenal there, as he intended, the slaves Beckham owned were freed at his death in accordance with his will. The first civilian Brown’s men shot and killed was Hayward Shepherd, a free Black man employed by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Avis, John Brown’s jailor, is also buried here. He was kind to Brown during the month between Brown’s trial and execution and befriended him, and as Brown left the jail to be hanged, he kissed Avis’s son. Avis had served as a captain in the antebellum militia company the Continental Morgan Guards, which wore Revolutionary War-style uniforms and was mustered into Confederate service as Company K, 5th Virginia Infantry when the Civil War began in 1861. About seventy graves in the front section of Edge Hill Cemetery hold Confederate soldiers who died in local hospitals from wounds suffered at nearby Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862, in the Battle of Antietam. Most of those soldiers were from North Carolina and South Carolina.

Ranson, West Virginia · United States