Storer College was a historically black college in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, that operated from 1867 to 1955. A national icon for Black Americans, in the town where the 'end of American slavery began', as Frederick Douglass famously put it, it was a unique institution whose focus changed several times. There is no one category of college into which it fits neatly. Sometimes white students studied alongside Black students, which at the time was prohibited by law at state-supported schools in West Virginia and the other Southern states, and sometimes in the North. In the twentieth century, Storer was at the center of the growing protest movement against Jim Crow treatment that would lead to the NAACP and the Civil Rights Movement. The first American meeting of the predecessor of the NAACP, the Niagara Movement, was held at Storer in 1906. John Brown's Fort, the main symbol of the end of slavery in the United States, was located from 1909 until 1968 on the Storer campus, where it was used as the college museum. The campus is now part of Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. Location "The locality is eminently healthful, and one of the most beautiful that can be imagined." According to an article in the Journal of Negro Education: History Founding Storer began in 1865 as a one-room elementary school, sponsored by New England Free Baptists and the Freedmen's Bureau. Its first class was 19 formerly enslaved children, described as "poorly clad, ill-kept, and undisciplined", who desperately needed the basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic. At a conference in 2015 honoring the 150th anniversary of Storer College, John Cuthbert, head of the West Virginia & Regional History Center, observed: Once slavery was ended in the United States and the education of Blacks was no longer prohibited, there was a "wild rush for the schools". A $10,000 matching grant from John Storer led to the charter of "a school which might eventually become a College, to be in located in one of the Southern States, at which youth could be educated without distinction of race or color". Though called a college from the beginning, it was a normal school until into the twentieth century, providing high school-level instruction to future primary school teachers. It also is not "historically black" in the usual sense. The student body was overwhelmingly Black, and in the 1910 advertisement reproduced at right it