Virginia’s Lost Counties

 

You can stand on the station platform at Harpers Ferry and see three States, two battlefields, two rivers and a panorama of natural scenery which the Kiwanis Club calls “the Little Switzerland of America” and which Thomas Jefferson said was “one of the most stupendous scenes in nature…worth a voyage across the Atlantic.”

Where the chasm yawns beneath and Shenandoah flows into Potomac, you behold the gigantic tumult of nature’s mighty forces meeting her immovable objects. Where the valley flattens out beyond, you look upon a tranquility of meadow and stream which the Indians named Sherundo—”clear-eyed daughter of the stars.”

The sermon in stone that Mr. Jefferson read “of a war between rivers and mountains that must have shaken the earth itself to its core” is yet legible. With the third President’s imagination you can picture, as did he, an inland ocean hurling its breakers against the peaks of the Blue Ridge until at last that mammoth bulwark was rent from summit to base, its fragments scattered as huge boulders the length and breadth of the valley, the waters themselves tumbling toward the Atlantic.

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