View from highway Historic downtown area of Staunton, Virginia. In the heart of the Shenandoah Valley, Staunton, VA. - the Queen City on the Great Wagon Road between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies - offers old fashioned Americana at its best. Staunton has one architectural advantage over most of other small towns in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia: it escaped the Civil War unscathed. Many of its 18th and early 19th century homes and buildings still stand and are wonderfully preserved. Western Virginia is mountainous, covered by the Allegheny and Blue Ridge mountains with the great Shenandoah Valley falling between the ranges. The central piedmont region, with its rolling hills, flattens out into the sandy coastal plain toward the Atlantic Ocean.