How Staunton earned the score

Let’s meet Staunton, Virginia

Say it like a local first: STAN-ton. The city sits at 1,417 feet in the Shenandoah Valley, platted in 1747 on William Beverley’s mill tract and named for Lady Rebecca Staunton, wife of colonial governor Sir William Gooch.^[1] It spent the eighteenth century as the seat of a frontier county so vast it once ran to the Mississippi, and it even served as Virginia’s capital for a few days in June 1781 while legislators fled the British.^[1] The 2020 census counted 25,750 people.^[2] Which is the first thing to hold onto here: everything that follows happened in a city smaller than most suburban high school districts.

The town that a visitor walks today is mostly the work of one boom. The Virginia Central Railroad arrived in 1854 and turned a courthouse village into a shipping center, stacking warehouses around the depot that sold everything from fresh produce and feed to wagons and harnesses, the blocks now preserved as the Wharf district.^[5] Between 1870 and 1920 the merchant class rebuilt downtown in brick and cast iron, much of it drawn by T. J. Collins, the architect behind the National Valley Bank and block after block of the streetscape that survives.^[6] Five of those neighborhoods, Beverley, the Wharf, Gospel Hill, Newtown, and Stuart Addition, are now nationally registered historic districts, listed between 1972 and 1984.^[5] Even the district names carry the town’s story. Gospel Hill takes its name from religious meetings held at Sampson Eagon’s blacksmith shop in the 1790s, and Newtown, for all its age, is the city’s oldest distinctly residential neighborhood.^[5]

The town that refused to tear itself down

None of that survival was guaranteed. Staunton’s core declined hard through the 1960s and 1970s, and the wrecking ball was already working: a 1962 road project took out 32 historic properties by 1965, and another proposal aimed an inner city highway through more of them.^[6] In 1971 a group of residents answered by forming the Historic Staunton Foundation and set about proving that the old buildings were an asset ledger, not a liability.^[6]

The foundation’s play was patient and unglamorous. Get the districts listed. Talk merchants into facade rehabilitations, one storefront at a time, with design help and state and federal historic tax credits. More than 250 buildings have been rehabilitated through that facade program, historic tax credit projects have drawn more than $50 million since 2000, private investment downtown has passed $60 million, and property values in the districts have climbed 279 percent on average since 1983.^[6] By 2013 the American Planning Association was calling West Beverley Street one of its Great Streets in America, mostly unscathed by the urban renewal and in town highways that transformed so many American downtowns after the war, and holding one of the nation’s largest collections of opulent Victorian commercial architecture.^[6]

So by the 1990s Staunton had solved the problem most small cities never solve, an intact and beautiful container. What it still lacked was a reason for anyone beyond the valley to drive there. The reason showed up asking about real estate.

A Shakespeare company looking for a home

In 1988, James Madison University professor Ralph Alan Cohen watched his former student Jim Warren play the title role in a campus production of Henry V; afterward Warren proposed that the two of them start a company.^[4] The Shenandoah Shakespeare Express was a twelve actor touring troupe with a contrarian premise: perform the plays under Shakespeare’s own conditions. Shows ran the two hours the Romeo and Juliet prologue promises. The lights stayed on so actors and audience shared the same room, the way daylight and candles once worked, and every actor was expected to know the meaning of every word spoken.^[4] By 2000 the company had played 47 states, one US territory, and six foreign countries, and it had outgrown the back of a van.^[4]

What the troupe wanted next was the thing no one else on earth had: Shakespeare’s indoor playhouse. Everyone knows the Globe, the open air theater rebuilt in London in 1997. But the Blackfriars, the candlelit winter hall where Shakespeare’s company staged his late plays, had been gone since 1655, and no one had ever rebuilt it.^[3] Plenty of larger cities could have chased the idea. Staunton, with a walkable Victorian downtown, a supportive city government, and cheap historic square footage two blocks off Beverley Street, made the pitch and won the company.^[3]

Building the theater Shakespeare lost

The re-created Blackfriars Playhouse opened on South Market Street in September 2001, built for $3.7 million with help from the city, Augusta County, the Commonwealth, and private donors.^[3] Architect Tom McLaughlin worked from plans of surviving seventeenth century halls, trips to England, and Shakespeare’s own stage directions, with scholarly advice from Andrew Gurr, former director of research at Shakespeare’s Globe, and C. Walter Hodges, the Globe’s illustrator.^[3] The result is a timber framed room where the audience sits in galleries and on the stage itself, the house lights never go down, and the actors play by the original staging practices, doubling parts and speaking to people they can see.

The company outgrew its name twice, dropping the regional label in 1998 and becoming the American Shakespeare Center in 2005, a change Cohen pushed to reflect what Staunton had become: a place that imports audiences and scholars rather than only exporting tours.^[4] It has run the room hard ever since, producing up to fourteen titles a year across five overlapping seasons with three distinct companies, so there is a show on the boards nearly every week of the calendar.^[7] Since opening night the Playhouse has welcomed 914,624 guests to 5,606 performances.^[7] Set that against the host: a city of 25,750 has drawn a paying theater audience roughly 35 times its own population, one ticket at a time, to a single room.

What one irreplaceable room does for a town

The Blackfriars works on Staunton the way a signature works on a contract. It converts a pleasant stop into a planned trip. Theater pilgrims, school groups, and scholars come specifically because this stage exists nowhere else, and in a recent year more than 7,600 students saw a show through the company’s matinee financial aid alone.^[7] And because a play ends at ten at night, the anchor manufactures overnights, dinners, and second days in a way a drive-through attraction cannot. A repertory calendar quietly fixes the small town seasonality problem too. Leaf season ends and beach weather never arrives, but Macbeth plays in January in a room that was designed to be lit by candles.

The numbers around it are small city numbers, but they are real and they are earned. Tourism Economics data published by the Virginia Tourism Corporation puts direct visitor spending in Staunton at $77.5 million for 2024, supporting 864 jobs, $25.9 million in labor income, and $4.2 million in local tax receipts.^[8] That is roughly $3,000 of visitor spending for every resident, in a city that never built a waterpark or an outlet mall to get it. It is also the kind of money that shows up as rehabilitated storefronts and full dining rooms rather than as a strip of franchise logos at the interchange.

What makes the score exceptional is the stack around the anchor. On Gospel Hill, the 1846 Greek Revival Manse where Woodrow Wilson was born in 1856 anchors his presidential library and museum, a campus that grew from the house itself into seven galleries when the museum opened in 1990, plus a research library holding the third largest collection of Wilson papers anywhere.^[9] On the eastern edge of town, the state run Frontier Culture Museum spreads eleven exhibits across 188 acres, including eight working farms moved or reconstructed from England, Germany, Ireland, West Africa, and early America, staffed by costumed interpreters who plant, forge, and cook the way the valley’s first immigrants did.^[10] The restored Wharf district turned rail warehouses into shops and studios, and the dining rooms that grew up to feed playgoers, farm to table spots like Zynodoa beside the Playhouse and chef Ian Boden’s tiny The Shack, now give the valley’s farms a stage of their own. A traveler can fill a weekend without repeating a theme: a candlelit tragedy on Friday, a president’s birth room and an old world farmstead on Saturday, five districts of Victorian streetscape stitching it all together on foot. That breadth is exactly what the Stay and Anchor pillars reward.

Why other towns should follow Staunton’s lead

Staunton ran a version of the play we score everywhere: protect the container, then land one anchor nobody can copy. The order mattered. Preservation came first and made the town worth walking; the Playhouse came second and made it worth driving to; the museums, restaurants, and districts turned a show into a weekend. It is the same compounding we watched in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, where Thomas Dambo’s troll sculptures gave a lakes town a one of one draw, except Staunton’s version is indoors, ticketed, and runs all winter.

Three lessons travel well. First, preserved architecture is inventory, not nostalgia; Staunton’s facade program turned 250 storefronts into the set dressing every visitor photographs.^[6] Second, you do not have to invent your anchor; Staunton recruited one that was looking for a home and met it with a building, public partners, and patience. Third, one world unique institution beats ten adequate attractions, because it cannot be cross shopped; nobody comparison prices the only Blackfriars on earth.

What is next is mostly a matter of finishing the loop. The honest caveat sits in the pillar grades: Web and Return trail the anchor scores, which means the digital front door and the engineered reasons to come back are still catching up to the product itself. A city that already owns the show, the streets, and the stories needs its online presence to sell the weekend as confidently as the box office sells the seat, and its calendar to give last spring’s visitors a date to return. Those are fixable gaps. The hard part, the part that took fifty years of stubborn preservation and one audacious theater, is already built.