Augusta County Courthouse

I-34

Augusta County, created by the Virginia General Assembly in 1738, was formally organized in 1745. Its original western boundary stretched “to the utmost limits of Virginia,” a claim that then extended to the Pacific Ocean. The county court first met in a log courthouse that William Beverley built on his property here. John Madison served as the county's first clerk of court from 1745 to 1778. Prominent regional architect T. J. Collins designed the current courthouse, the fifth on this site, in the Beaux-Arts and Neo-Classical Revival styles. The building, completed in 1901, was listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

Department of Historic Resources, 2021

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References/Bibliographic Citation:

Augusta County Circuit Court Order Book 1 (1745-1749). Augusta County Circuit Court Minute Book (1774-1777). Augusta County Courthouse, NRHP nomination (1982). Jos. A. Waddell, Annals of Augusta County, 2d ed. (Staunton: C. Russell Caldwell, 1902). Lyman Chalkley, Chronicles of the Scotch-Irish Settlement in Virginia, vol. 1 (1912). William Waller Hening, Statutes at Large, 5: 78-80. Staunton Spectator, 27 July 1853. John O. and Margaret T. Peters, Virginia’s Historic Courthouses (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995). Carl R. Lounsbury, The Courthouses of Early Virginia: An Architectural History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005). Augusta County Courthouse Feasibility Study, vol. 2 (2012): https://historicstaunton.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Augusta-Courthouse-Study-Vol-2.pdf https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/313 Virginia Constitution of 1776: https://www.law.gmu.edu/assets/files/academics/founders/VA-Constitution.pdf