The War Between the States turned peaceful Strasburg into a bitterly contested battleground. This memorial obelisk, erected by Confederate veterans in 1896, sits in the Presbyterian cemetery.
Our rural hometown, just west of the Blue Ridge and 80 miles from D.C., boasts houses dating from the 1790s to the 1930s. In the 1750s, when Strasburg was born, the town could be reached only via the Great Valley Road, an ancient Indian trail that Germanic and Scots–Irish settlers adopted to travel from Pennsylvania through the Shenandoah Valley to Kentucky. (It’s now part of U.S. 11.) Marcy McCann, who lives over her East King Street art shop, says, “Out of my front window, I can see the whole history of the town.”
