Woodstock and the Oldest Courthouse West of the Blue Ridge

The small town of Woodstock, Virginia has stood in the Shenandoah Valley since seventeen fifty-two, when a German immigrant named Jacob Miller laid out a settlement he called Muellerstadt, which translates roughly to Miller Town. The name did not stick; the town was chartered by the Virginia colonial assembly in seventeen sixty-one under its current name. But the German character of the place left a permanent mark in stone.

Woodstock has been the county seat of Shenandoah County since the county was formed in seventeen seventy-two. The courthouse that stands here today was completed in seventeen ninety-five, and it is considered the oldest courthouse still in use west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was reportedly designed by Thomas Jefferson, whose interest in civic architecture extended well beyond Monticello. The building's coursed limestone walls and hexagonal cupola with an ogee roof reflect the German Baroque sensibility of the settlers who raised it. It is a courthouse that looks more like a small church in the Black Forest than anything you would find in Williamsburg.

During the Civil War, both Union and Confederate troops occupied Woodstock at various times, and soldiers from each side left their names scratched into the interior plaster of the courthouse. Those ghost signatures are still there.

The town sits on a broad loop of the North Fork of the Shenandoah River, which bends dramatically around its western edge, and the valley here is among the most beautiful stretches of the entire Shenandoah. During Stonewall Jackson's eighteen sixty-two Valley Campaign, Woodstock served as a staging point and supply depot. Union General Franz Sigel retreated through here in eighteen sixty-four on his way to the defeat at New Market that you are approaching. The courthouse museum still holds records of a community that has watched armies pass through this valley for a hundred and fifty years and somehow endured every one of them.