This impressive town is a scale model of Harper's Ferry, located on the Maryland/Virginia border approximately 120 miles from Washington DC. It was all scratch built by Herb Gundt of H.G. Walls. The buildings and layout were based on period maps.
It was used in a game system called Brother Against Brother, an ACW skirmish style game that worked very well for this fight. I'll let Herb describe the project:
Last July H.G. WALLS (my company) along with Duncan Macfarlane of WARGAMES ILLUSTRATED published an American Civil War small tactical set of rules entitled BROTHER AGAINST BROTHER. As part of the ongoing effort to market our ruleset, we looked for an attractive game format to use as a participation game at HISTORICON 1998. Bob Beattie has been running a "John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry" game for years and we decided that this game would make a nice vehicle to convert into a BAB scenario.
I think that I was somewhat mad to tackle this project because it would require over 30 model buildings to go along with my custom model building backlog of around 18 months. To speed up the modelling process for the Harpers Ferry project, I opted to use as many commercially available products as I economically could. I also recruited my 20 year old "protege", Matt Hostetler, to make 3 of the larger buildings.
In 1859, Harpers Ferry was a town with a U.S. Government Arsenal and Armoury, made up of many brick buildings and typical American style clapboard houses.
We decided to "cheat" as much as possible in making the buildings and used the ERTL "Cow Town" set as well as a number of German plastic HO model railroad structures that I purchased in "mass" from a gentleman that was eliminating his collection. Even though we required 25mm scale models, we have been able to use carefully selected HO scale models in some instances. By adding 25mm doors most commonly, it is simple to make the properly chosen HO model look like a small 25mm building. Of course, many of the models had to be scratch built and were very labour intensive.
Harpers Ferry also needed to have a railroad track running thru it along with a train to deliver the U.S. Marines later in the game. This was a problem at first, since there are no suitable 25mm 19th century railroad models that I know of (HO is too small and O is too large). Fortunately, while wandering around thru TOYS R US, I stumbled across a toy Christmas RR set designed to go underneath a Christmas Tree that was the perfect size.
The passenger cars were a bit too small and if I would have had more time I would have made them larger, but would do in a pinch. After I painted the plastic track, I mounted it on Masonite and added weeds and ballast. All of the roofs on the model buildings are removable for the game (in fact 95% of the custom models that I build have removable roofs), which of course adds more time to the cost of construction. Most of the roofs in 1859 Harpers Ferry are either wood shakes or copper sheeting. I make the wood shake roofs by using "tree wrap" and cutting it to look like individual shakes. In case you don't know what tree wrap is, or we are once again separated by our common language, I will try to describe it for you. It is a roll of brownish paperlike material, approx. 2 1/2" wide and usually 25-30 feet long, similar to crepe paper only heavier. I just use the natural color of the product and dry brush lighter shades to white over it. I can usually find this material in Nursery or Garden Shops.
The copper sheeting is represented by cutting index cards into 1/4" wide lengths using a razor knife on a cutting mat. This technique causes somewhat ragged edge to be formed on the downward side. I then glue the strips onto the roof of the model with the "ragged" edge up, which tends to give the roof the appearance of sheet metal "seams". I paint the roof with an undercoat of brown and then dry brush it up thru to a color of very pale green. This gives a quite realistic copper "patina" look to the roof.