|
|
Historical Highway MarkersStephens FamilyA-127
Peter and Maria Stephens, German immigrants, settled here with their children in 1732. They had come from Pennsylvania with a group led by Jost Hite to form the Opequon settlement, a set of dispersed homesteads in this region. Archaeology reveals that the Stephens house occupied a site that Native Americans had once inhabited. Peter and Maria's son Lewis, land speculator, entrepreneur, and militia officer, laid out a town here, which the General Assembly established as Stephensburgh in 1758. The town, later known as Newtown and then as Stephens City, was about a day’s wagon journey south of Winchester, setting a precedent for similarly spaced developments along the Great Valley Road.
Department of Historic Resources, 2019 See a problem? Report it to HighwayMarkers@dhr.virginia.gov. |
DHR could use your help! We don't have a recent image of this marker. If you have one that you'd like to submit for inclusion on this site, please send it to HighwayMarkers@dhr.virginia.gov. |
|
References/Bibliographic Citation: M. S. Giuseppi, Naturalizations of Foreign Protestants in the American and West Indian Colonies (1921). Hening, Statutes, 7:284-286. Daniel W. Bly, From the Rhine to the Shenandoah, vol. 3 (Baltimore: Gateway Press, 2002). Cecil O’Dell, Pioneers of Old Frederick County, Virginia (Westminster, MD: Heritage Books, 2007). Samuel Kercheval, A History of the Valley of Virginia, 6th ed. (Harrisonburg: C. J. Carrier Company, 1981). Warren Hofstra, The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). Warren R. Hofstra and Karl Raitz, eds., The Great Valley Road of Virginia: Shenandoah Landscapes from Prehistory to the Present (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010). Inez Virginia Steele, Early Days and Methodism in Stephens City, Virginia, 1732-1905 (Winchester: George F. Norton Publishing Company, 1906). Denis Hudgins, ed., Cavaliers and Pioneers: Abstracts of Virginia Land Patents and Grants, vol. 4 (Richmond: Virginia Genealogical Society, 1994). www.newtownhistorycenter.org Marcus Lemasters, et al., “A Phase I Investigation of the Peter Stephens Homestead: A Site Located on the T. Wilson Property, Stephens City, Virginia,” Quarterly Bulletin of the Archeological Society of Virginia, vol. 70, no. 4 (Dec. 2015): 139-153. Stephens City Historic District, National Register of Historic Places nomination (1991). |