Emancipation Celebrations

“With Great Propriety… We Celebrate the Act of Emancipation”

Twenty-four years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation a crowd of approximately 3,000 gathered at Island Park, an amusement park constructed in 1880 by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad on Byrnes Island, upstream from Harpers Ferry in the Potomac River, to celebrate the anniversary of this important step on the path of slavery’s annihliation.[1] As the music, provided by bands from Baltimore and Frederick, Maryland, died down around 2:00 p.m. the audience turned its attention to the speaker’s platform. Among those who delivered remarks was a minister from Baltimore, A.B. Wilson. “It is with great propriety that we celebrate the act of emancipation, as that act ends the dark pages of the history of over 4,000,000 of our race in this country, and is the beginning of a new era.”[2]

Scenes such as the one that unfolded at Harpers Ferry in 1887 proved commonplace throughout the Shenandoah Valley from the Civil War’s aftermath through the early 1900s. Emancipation celebrations in the Shenandoah, the earliest recorded instance of which occurred in Winchester in early January 1868, offered an opportunity to not only commemorate slavery’s destruction, but directly challenge the Lost Cause.

1. The Baltimore Sun, August 19, 1887; Teresa S. Moyer and Paul A. Shackle, The Making of Harpers Ferry National Historical Park: A Devil, Two Rivers, and a Dream (Lanham, MD: Alta Mira Press, 2008), 24.
2. Address of Rev. A.B. Wilson quoted in The Baltimore Sun, August 19, 1887.