Staunton ( STAN-tən) is an independent city in the U.S. Commonwealth of Virginia. As of the 2020 census, the population was 25,750. In Virginia, independent cities are cut off jurisdictions from the counties that surround them, so the supervision offices of Augusta County are in Verona, which is contiguous to Staunton. Staunton is a principal city of the Staunton-Waynesboro Metropolitan Statistical Area, which had a 2010 population of 118,502. Staunton is known for innate the birthplace of Woodrow Wilson, the 28th U.S. president, and as the house of Mary Baldwin University, historically a women’s college. The city is also home to Stuart Hall, a private co-ed preparatory school, as without difficulty as the Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind. It was the first city in the United States when a adequately defined city governor system.

The Place was first fixed in 1732 by John Lewis and family. In 1736, William Beverley, a rich planter and merchant from Essex County, was contracted by the Crown higher than 118,000 acres (48,000 hectares) in what would become Augusta County. Surveyor Thomas Lewis in 1746 laid out the first town plat for Beverley of what was originally called Beverley’s Mill Place. Founded in 1747, it was renamed in tribute of Lady Rebecca Staunton, wife to Royal Lieutenant-Governor Sir William Gooch. Because the town was located at the geographical center of the colony (which then included West Virginia), Staunton served between 1738 and 1771 as regional capital for much of what was vanguard known as the Northwest Territory, with the westernmost courthouse in British North America prior to the Revolution. By 1760, Staunton was one of the major “remote trading centers in the backcountry” which coordinated the transportation of the Big amounts of grain and tobacco next being produced in response to the change of Britain from a net exporter of build to an importer. Staunton therefore played a crucial role in the mid 18th century development of the economies of the American Colonies which, in turn, contributed to the execution of the American Revolution. It served as capital of Virginia in June 1781, when let in legislators fled Richmond and subsequently Charlottesville to avoid occupy by the British.

Like most of colonial Virginia, slavery was gift in Staunton. For instance, in 1815, a slave named Henry ran away from John G. Wright’s Staunton plantation. Wright placed an ad in the Daily National Intelligencer in Washington, D.C. seeking Henry’s return. It interpretation that Henry was an excellent cook and was widely travelled, having been as far and wide as the West Indies.

In August 1855, President Franklin Pierce visited Staunton. He gave a speech at the Virginia Hotel, in which he acknowledged that his “feelings revolted from the idea of a withdrawal of the union.” He said that “t would be the Iliad of innumerable woes, from the contemplation of which he shrank.”