Where the Fourth of July Was Born, Sheltered, and Silenced
A county that helped author independence. A church on Beverley Street that saved a government. A few chapters of American history that all passed through the same small city in the Shenandoah Valley.
Independence Day has deep roots in Staunton. Long before parades looped the park or fireworks lit the valley, this city shaped the holiday and then, during its worst years, watched the holiday turn hollow under the weight of war.
A County That Helped Start the Whole Thing
In the spring of 1776, independence from Britain was not yet a settled matter. It was a proposition, contested and uncertain, moving slowly through colonial legislatures and Continental Congress debates. Augusta County pushed it forward.
According to Encyclopedia Virginia, Augusta County delegate Thomas Lewis introduced what became known as the Augusta Declaration at the Fifth Virginia Convention on May 10, 1776. It was the first official statement at that convention calling for independence from Britain. Five days later, Virginia declared itself independent, and those resolutions were forwarded to the Continental Congress, where Richard Henry Lee introduced them nearly word for word on June 7. Congress approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The county seat of that county was Staunton. Its delegate helped set the founding document in motion.
Five years later, the city played an even more direct role in keeping the young republic alive. In the spring of 1781, British cavalry under Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton drove Virginia’s legislators out of Richmond and then chased them from Charlottesville, nearly capturing Governor Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. The Virginia House of Delegates’ own historical record documents what happened next: the lawmakers crossed the Blue Ridge and convened on June 7 in the Episcopal church in Staunton, keeping themselves ready to flee farther west if the British continued pursuit. They stayed through June 23. For sixteen days, what is now Trinity Episcopal Church on West Beverley Street served as the capital of Virginia.
Trinity’s own history page notes that a Windsor chair from those legislative sessions remains on display inside. A Daughters of the American Revolution marker in the churchyard lists the names of every Assembly member who gathered there. The British never made it over the mountains. The Assembly held, and Yorktown followed that October.
How the Holiday Looked in Early Staunton
By the early 1800s, Independence Day had become a fixture of community life in Staunton. The Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia has preserved an 1809 account from the Staunton Eagle, the city’s newspaper at the time, which recorded that year’s celebration this way: “About 50 gentlemen and a number of ladies partook of a plain Barbecue, where none but Domestic productions were eaten. In short, the whole afternoon was spent with good humor, harmony, and joy, which the fourth of July ought always to inspire into the bosoms of Americans.”
A generation later, the mood had grown louder. The Frontier Culture Museum also cites a separate observer from the 1830s, who recorded that the holiday was “ushered in by the discharge of guns.” The Fourth had become, by then, a community occasion with some noise behind it.
When the Holiday Went Quiet
The Civil War changed what July Fourth meant in Staunton almost immediately.
Staunton had voted 3,300 to 6 in favor of secession on May 23, 1861. The city that had briefly served as Virginia’s capital was now feeding a Confederate army. As Encyclopedia Virginia documents, Staunton sat at a vital transportation crossroads and served the Confederacy almost continuously as an army depot, quartermaster and commissary post, and training camp. Generals Jackson and Ewell both used the town as headquarters at various points. Trains carried the valley’s grain and supplies east over the mountains to Richmond.
By 1863, the shelves were bare. Stores that before the war had been stocked with molasses, sugar, coffee, tea, and fish were down to pins and thread. Staunton diarist Joseph Waddell wrote that the memory of those full shelves felt like nothing more than a dream. He later described the mood settling over the city as “a deep feeling of gloom. It is like walking through the valley of the shadow of death.”
There was no community barbecue. No guns fired in celebration. The Fourth of July, for a Confederate city feeding a losing war, had become a different kind of day entirely.
Union forces finally broke through on June 6, 1864, when General David Hunter led his troops into Staunton and occupied it until June 10. As Encyclopedia Virginia records, they destroyed warehouses, mills, factories, workshops, stores, houses, and the railroad depot, and looted food and valuables before moving on. The city that had sent 100 men to Harpers Ferry in a single morning in April 1861 spent the summer of 1864 in ruins.
The Fourth of July, which Stauntonians in 1809 had called a day of good humor and joy, had taken nearly a century to build into a community tradition. The war stripped it down to nothing. Rebuilding would take another generation.
The city did not even know the war had ended right away. According to Encyclopedia Virginia, it took five days for news of Lee's surrender at Appomattox to reach Staunton residents.
Five days of not knowing.
The place that had sent the resolution to Philadelphia that started the whole republic, that had sheltered Virginia's government when the British came over the mountains, had to wait nearly a week to learn that the country it had briefly tried to leave was still standing. July Fourth would eventually come back to Staunton. The barbecues and the gun salutes and the community joy that the Staunton Eagle had described in 1809 would return, in time, in new forms.
But the city carried all of that history with it. It still does.
Local history is a new section of The Stauntonian. If there is a story, a building, a person, or an era you want us to look into, write to Brad at brad@stauntonian.com.