The main town of Augusta County, Staunton, occupied the center of the county where the two main roads crossed. The town was an important administrative and trade center, anchoring a large area of the Valley. Other towns grew up along the main roads as well. Waynesboro, named after General Anthony Wayne of the Revolution, developed where the road from Rockfish Gap lowered into Augusta; Fishersville grew up in the middle of the bountiful farm land halfway between Staunton and Waynesboro. Churchville lay on the western side of Staunton, where the east-west road began to rise once again. Smaller towns, Verona and Mount Sidney, dotted the Valley Turnpike above Staunton. To the north of Augusta, in the next county, lay the substantial town of Harrisburg; to the south, Lexington. The state invested considerable sums in grading and improving roads that tied the Valley together.

By the end of the 1850s, Staunton, with about four thousand people, had developed into something of a showplace. Thanks to the determination of its legislators who labored to win state dollars for the western part of Virginia, Staunton had become home to the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Institution and the Western Lunatic Asylum. These institutions, embodiments of a new modern style of benevolence, brought jobs and spending to Staunton and Augusta. So did several schools that grew in the county, including the Augusta Female Seminary, the Wesleyan Female Institute, and Mossy Creek Academy. The Lutherans and Episcopalians built impressive churches in Staunton.

Augusta County had worked hard in the late 1840s to extend the Virginia Central Railroad across the Blue Ridge into their county. Conventions in Staunton mobilized voters and capital to attract the train into Augusta. The extension posed an engineering challenge as well as a political and financial one, but a French engineer and Irish workers carved an impressive tunnel through the mountains. The Virginia Central reached Staunton in 1854, providing the county with ready access to Washington, Baltimore, Richmond, and the Atlantic as well as to other parts of the Valley to the south and west. Virginia almost quadrupled its railroad mileage in the 1850s, adding nearly 1,300 miles to the network, knitting the state together more tightly and tying it into markets both to the north and the south.

Tourists poured into Augusta via the new train. Since the days of the American Indians, hot springs in the Valley had been renowned for their medicinal and soothing powers; the springs of Virginia, in fact, became one of the most popular tourist attractions in all of the young United States. Augusta was not fortunate enough to contain the most famous and lucrative of those springs, but the county made the most of what it had. A local reporter was predictably impressed by his visit to Augusta's Stribling Springs, where the waters "are pronounced invaluable for medicinal purposes by the best judges." Despite these medicinal benefits, many people visited the springs only to see and be seen, to be pampered by attentive servants and to dine on hotel fare. Fortunately, the superintendent at Stribling Springs "is decidedly the most accommodating gentleman it has ever been our pleasure to meet with in this selfish world," the local editor shamelessly enthused. "We verily believe if some credulous epicure should desire for his dinner a nice slice of green cheese from the moon, 'twould be forthcoming, if Woodward could, by any possible or impossible means, get a ladder tall enough to reach that romantic orb." The three large hotels in Staunton--the Virginia, National, and American--filled with people during the late summer months when the well-to-do from Washington and other cities, along with wealthy planters from the Carolinas or Georgia, converged on the springs to escape the worst of the heat and to find one another's company.

A newspaper editor offered his perspective on the changes Staunton had experienced in the 1850s. "The population has increased largely, and is almost entirely changed. Most of those who were known as the old and substantial citizens of the place twelve years ago, have passed from the theatre of action, and their places are supplied by others--many of them not 'natives to the manor born.' Staunton has become changed from a town to a city--and now rejoices in a Railroad, Telegraph, Gas, and many other wonderful things to which she was a stranger then." Augusta's county seat could claim its share of nineteenth-century progress.

Staunton, working to improve itself, bore the signs of growing pains. In 1859 the city fathers had paid to have gas lighting installed and had also funded a pump for the water works. In the process, they dug up the streets of Staunton. For years thereafter, the residents complained of the mud. One editor put the problem in the largest chronological perspective: "Never, we believe since the era of chaos, when, as the geologists tell us, this solid ball which men call earth, was one dismal flat of unmitigated mud and ooze and slime, has there existed as muddy a place as this same town of Staunton." The mud, he judged, was "deep enough to swim pigs."

The forty richest households in the town included an intriguing mix. Not surprisingly, seven merchants, six attorneys, one physician and one dentist stood among the elite--each of whom averaged over $50,000 worth of property--but so did the editor of the Staunton Spectator, the president of the Central Bank of Virginia, the sheriff of the county, the proprietors of two hotels, a mathematics professor, two surveyors, a judge, a cashier in a local bank, and a retired captain from the United States Navy. The wealthiest man in town--indeed in the county--was C. R. Mason, who possessed nearly a third of a million dollars. Born in New York, he had made his money with the railroad and the accompanying mail contract. Also among the wealthy were H. Merrillat, from Bourdeaux, who served as the principal of the Institute of the Blind, and Richard Phillips, a Virginian, principal of the Wesleyan Female Institute.

Three young female students at area schools also numbered among the wealthiest Augusta residents. Harve Peyton, Mary Stuart, and Rebecca Taylor--22, 16, and 16, respectively--were credited with tens of thousands of dollars each. The female principal of one of the female institutes appeared among the elite and the four female institutes themselves were counted among the wealthiest "households." The prominent families throughout Virginia and the South who sent their daughters to Staunton created a sheltered world for their beloved children.

All wealth in Staunton, however, was not the result of inherited privilege. Several artisans had also managed to accumulate impressive wealth and rank among the top forty. John Ast worked as a butcher, Adam Lushbaugh as a master carpenter, and Benjamin Points as a master tinner. A prosperous free black man, Robert Campbell, who had been born in the Tidewater area of Virginia but had come to Staunton early in the century.

Staunton exercised greater influence in Augusta than its sheer size would have indicated. Staunton claimed a number of imposing homes and impressive buildings that made the small town the center of attention for a wide area in the state. The town faced little competition from nearby towns. Waynesboro, fifteen miles or so to the east, only had 457 residents. The other villages of Augusta were smaller still, with a few dozen residents and houses. Those places served as the basis for artisans and schools and churches, but little more.

While Staunton contained the usual array of artisan shops found in counties across nineteenth-century America--blacksmiths, millers, tanners, boot and shoe makers, tobacconists, hatters, and the like--only two places could be thought of as "factories." Judson McCoy employed eight men in his carriage making shop and B. Crawford and Company employed thirteen men and eighteen women in their woolen mill. Kate Kelly and Lucy Snider ran millinery shops where nine women worked. Four more women worked in a print shop.

Staunton, then, trafficked in the official business of the county and handled the business that farmers generated. Its residents sold things to one another, to students, and to the tourists who came through town. They operated railroads and depots, schools and institutes and churches. They carved gravestones and made jewelry. They sewed dresses and made hats. They built, plastered, and painted houses. The town attained a reputation for gentility and learning. It depended entirely on its large and rich hinterland for its continued success.

Schools, churches, and mills shaped the rural landscape. An advertisement for a "Very Desirable Farm" in Augusta located it in the web of crucial rural institutions. That farm of 205 acres--some cleared and "in a very high state of cultivation," some in "fine timber," and some in "choice Meadow--lay ten miles north of Staunton and eight miles from Spring Hill. But it was not isolated. "It is easy of access, convenient to Mills, Churches, Schools, etc., being near to Mossy Creek Academy." The place claimed a "good Orchard, a never-failing limestone Spring, with plenty of running water." Altogether, it was "as well adapted to the growth of grain and grass as any farm in Augusta or any where else."

Such farms were not unusual in Augusta. Rich farms and plantations dominated the countryside. Indeed, the farms of Augusta were valued at nearly eleven million dollars--the highest in the state of Virginia. While that large value was in part the product of Augusta's size, the farms of the county averaged over $7,000 in value, fourteenth of the 148 counties in the state and Augusta's $1.3 million worth of livestock ranked eighteenth. As in the other counties of the Valley, swine predominated among livestock in number and in value, followed by beef cattle, milk cattle, sheep, and horses. Agriculture had flourished in Augusta throughout the 1850s. The number of farms had increased from 1,264 to 1,543, the number of improved acres had jumped by nearly 50,000, and the cash value of farms had grown by nearly four million dollars.

In the autumn, Augusta was awash with grain of every kind: 752,000 bushels of corn, 307,000 bushels of wheat, 191,000 bushels of oats, 57,000 bushels of rye , and 7,000 bushels of buckwheat. Farms in the county also produced nearly half a million pounds of butter, seventeen thousand pounds of honey, fifteen thousand pounds of cheese, thirty six thousand pounds of wool, forty two thousand bushels of Irish potatoes, and nearly six thousand gallons of molasses. A good portion of these products were sold outside the Valley, making their way into Philadelphia and Baltimore.

At the top of Augusta's rural economic order stood the 385 men, women, and companies that owned real property worth over $10,000. Some of the farms they owned were spectacularly large. M. G. Harman, only 37 years old, ran a farm in northern Augusta valued at $130,000. It spread over 2,300 acres, 1,700 of them improved. On that acreage were 70 horses, 2 oxen, 28 cattle, 70 sheep, and 100 swine. The farm grew 5,000 bushels of wheat, 800 bushels of rye, 10,000 bushels of corn, 2,000 bushels of oats, 300 bushels of potatoes, and assorted products of the orchard, dairy, and home manufacturing. Other farms were nearly as big: Samuel Finley's was worth $100,000 and Ben Crawford's $88,000.

Not all of the largest farms belonged to the traditional native white male planter. Partnerships operated some of Augusta's big farms, with firms such as Clater and Brother, Crosby and Fishburn, and Stuart and Company prominent among them. Some farms were owned by men who did not identify themselves as farmers, but rather as attorneys, merchants, and physicians; they lived in Staunton and employed overseers to manage their farms. Eighteen women numbered among the big property-holders in Augusta. Some, such as Elizabeth Spitler, Lititia Martin, and Elizabeth Plecker, all in their 70s and 80s, were older widows. Others, such as Susan Dickenson, 36, had inherited land on their own at a much younger age, either from early widowhood or having never married. A few immigrants from Ireland, such as Richard Guy, William Guy, and James Brown, managed to establish large farms, as did F. Radner from the Upper Rhine. Some of the most successful farmers had come from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Tennessee, and even New Hampshire.

Nearly two hundred Augusta heads of household called themselves farmers but owned no land. A few of these men worked other jobs as well. Samuel Carson knew blacksmithing, David Clemer labored in a distillery, Alexander Gardner considered himself a merchant, Harvey Lambert and Jacob Stover practiced carpentry, and Joseph Trimble was a miller. The more than 150 landless Augusta white men who headed households and called themselves farmers probably rented land or worked as tenants who shared with landlords the crops they produced.

Occupying a more troubling position were the 635 rural men who headed households and yet were unskilled laborers. Eighty seven of these men owned at least a little real estate--perhaps a small home somewhere in the county--but were frozen out of farming for themselves. While some Irish immigrants were scattered among these laborers, the vast majority of these men were native white Virginians. With an average age of about 38, most of these men could not realistically expect to become much better off by the time their productive lives had come to an end.

The bulk of the white farmers of Augusta, however, occupied neither extreme of wealth or poverty. About 80 percent of the farmers and laborers who headed households owned land in Augusta, a figure characteristic of much of the South. The value of farms in the county had increased considerably in the 1850s, growing nearly 25 percent. Most farms clustered around 150 acres or so. It was hard to make a living on fewer than fifty acres but larger farms demanded more labor and machinery than most people could afford. Everyone knew that a big farm required slaves and slaves were becoming more expensive every day.