Sunset on Skyline Drive at Stanley, VA

Photo by Michael Habersack, Sr.

	Geography QuickFacts	Page County	Virginia
	Land area, 2000 (square miles)	311	39,594
	Persons per square mile, 2000	74.5	178.8
	Metropolitan Area	None

	People QuickFacts	Page County	Virginia
	Population, 2001 estimate	23,195	7,187,734
	Population percent change, April 1, 2000-July 1, 2001	0.1%	1.5%
	Population, 2000	23,177	7,078,515
	Population, percent change, 1990 to 2000	6.9%	14.4%

Click here for a map by Ken Gissy of Page County

Formed March 30, 1831 from mostly Shenandoah County (230 sq. miles), 84 sq. miles came from the NE corner of Rockingham County. The county seat is Luray which was formed August 21, 1812. Page County is named after John Page who was a Lieutenant-Governor during the Revolution, a member of the first U.S. Congress and Governor of Virginia.

"Founded by members of the Church of England, the Virginia colony established in its charter that no other churches were to be tolerated. With the notorious bloody code of 1611, the first published for the government of the Colony, every man and woman in the Colony,

"or who should afterwards arrive, should give an account of faith and religion to the parish minister, and if not satisfactory to him, they should repair often to him for instruction; and if they refuse to go, the Governor should whip the offender for the first offense, for the second refusal to be whipped twice and to acknowledge his fault on the Sabbath day in congregation; for the third offense to be whipped every day till he complied."

Over forty years into the establishment of homesteads on the Shenandoah frontier, the Baptists began to find hope in escaping the long-experienced persecution in Virginia. By 1756 several Baptist congregations were organized in what is now Rockingham, Shenandoah Page Counties. By the 1770s, on the east side of the Massanutten Mountain, in what is now Page County, a congregation was being built up by Baptists, partly, as it appears, from the Mennonite community and centered around the famous White House."