The Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, destroyed during the Civil War, was never rebuilt. The lower town lay in poor condition. But on higher ground, sturdy buildings that once housed armory workers stood nearly vacant. With help from New England's Free Baptists and the Freedmen's Bureau, Brackett claimed one of these structures -- Lockwood House, named for a Union general who had briefly stayed there -- as his school's first home. Parents and children sometimes sat in the same classroom, "but the rising generation so far outstripped their ancestors that the old folks became ashamed of themselves, and gave it up." In 1869, with support from Senator James Garfield, Congress transferred four former armory buildings to the school. The College was formally dedicated on December 22, 1869, chartered to educate students "without distinction of race or color" -- a phrase that was fiercely debated at the time.

Harpers Ferry did not welcome Storer College. Residents tried slander, vandalism, and political pressure to shut down the school. They petitioned the state legislature to revoke its charter. At one point, female teachers required a military escort. The school charged almost nothing -- three dollars per quarter for tuition, three dollars for a room -- and depended on Free Baptist donations and intermittent state funding. West Virginia refused to fully support Storer because of its religious affiliation and because the state constitution prohibited Black and white students from studying together in publicly funded schools. When Richard Ishmael McKinney became Storer's first African American president in 1944, carrying a Ph.D. from Yale and a vision of making Storer a serious four-year institution, the community greeted him with a burning cross on his front lawn.

Storer College became a crossroads of African American history. In 1881, Frederick Douglass delivered his famous address on John Brown at the school, drawing crowds from Maryland, Virginia, and as far as New England. In July 1896, the first national convention of the National League of Colored Women visited the campus and John Brown's Fort. Most significantly, in 1906, W.E.B. Du Bois brought the Niagara Movement -- the direct precursor to the NAACP -- to Storer for its second annual conference, and its first meeting on American soil (the inaugural 1905 gathering had been held in Canada to avoid racial discrimination in Northern hotels). The program for the movement's inaugural gathering had been typed on the back of Storer letterhead. Attendees walked barefoot to John Brown's Fort in a symbolic pilgrimage. The movement demanded voting rights, educational opportunity, and an end to racial discrimination. Storer's white administrators grew uncomfortable with the group's militancy, and pressures from outside prevented the 1907 meeting from being held there.

In 1909, on the fiftieth anniversary of John Brown's raid, the famous engine house where Brown made his last stand was moved to the Storer campus. It had traveled a strange journey -- dismantled and shipped to Chicago for the 1893 World's Fair, then returned to a farm near Harpers Ferry. On the campus, it housed the college museum, its display cases holding pictures of Brown, Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson side by side. The Fort remained at Storer through the college's closure in 1955. In 1968, the National Park Service moved it back to lower Harpers Ferry, as close to its original location as possible. A plaque that W.E.B. Du Bois had prepared decades earlier was finally erected in 2006 -- not on the Fort itself, but on the former Storer campus, at the Fort's earlier location, by request of the Black community.

Storer's end is often attributed to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which eliminated the segregation rationale for state funding. The truth is more complicated. The college had been accumulating debt for a decade. Providing four-year degrees was far more expensive than training primary school teachers, and the Free Baptists -- whose support depended partly on children's Sunday School contributions -- could not shoulder the cost. Storer never received regional accreditation because it never applied, which forced it to turn away aspiring doctors and other students needing recognized credentials. In June 1955, Storer College closed its doors forever. Its campus is now part of Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, and the remaining buildings house the National Park Service's Stephen T. Mather Training Center. Each August, the dwindling ranks of Storer alumni still gather in Harpers Ferry for a reunion.