Stephens City, Virginia

The small town you're passing through has been here since seventeen fifty-eight, making it the second-oldest municipality in the Shenandoah Valley. Peter Stephens, a German immigrant from Heidelberg, settled this ground in the seventeen thirties as part of the frontier Opequon Settlement. His son Lewis successfully petitioned the Virginia colonial government for a town charter, citing the need for a defensible community during the French and Indian War.

For most of the following century the town went by Newtown, and under that name it became famous across the mid-Atlantic for the Newtown wagon, a heavy-duty variant of the Conestoga that carried freight and families along the Valley Pike. By eighteen thirty the population had reached eight hundred. During the Civil War, every army that moved up or down the Valley, Jackson's men, Banks's men, Sheridan's cavalry, passed through Newtown's single main street.

The town was nearly burned in eighteen sixty-four when Confederate raiders struck Union supply trains nearby. It survived, took the name Stephens City in eighteen eighty, and today sits along the same corridor it has occupied for nearly three centuries.