Before he was Steph Curry’s father, before he was the Charlotte Hornets’ all-time leading scorer, before sixteen seasons in the NBA built him into one of the purest outside shooters the league has ever produced, Dell Curry was a kid in Grottoes, Virginia, walking to his coach’s barn after school to practice his shot.

Born in Harrisonburg, Raised in the Valley

Wardell Stephen Curry was born on June 25, 1964, in Harrisonburg. He was raised in Grottoes, a small Augusta County town in the Shenandoah Valley floor, roughly halfway between Harrisonburg and Waynesboro along the South River. It wasn’t exactly a basketball factory when Dell was growing up there.

What it had was space, and a barn. Dell attended Fort Defiance High School in the Augusta County community of the same name, and the story that follows him out of that chapter is simple and specific: he used his coach’s barn as a private shooting gym, going there daily to work on the mechanics that would eventually make him one of the most accurate perimeter shooters in NBA history. He left Fort Defiance as the school’s all-time leading scorer and a McDonald’s All-American in 1982, one of the top high school players in the country that year and a two-sport talent good enough that the Texas Rangers drafted him out of high school in baseball.

Two Sports, One Decision

Even though the Rangers’ drafted him, Dell passed on the opportunity. He chose Virginia Tech instead, playing four years for the Hokies and developing into the kind of precise outside scorer that gets NBA scouts interested. The conference recognition came: Metro Conference Player of the Year in 1986, three first-team all-conference selections. Virginia Tech retired his number 30 after he graduated. He was selected 15th overall in the 1986 NBA Draft by the Utah Jazz, and his professional career began.

What followed was a nomadic few seasons, a year with the Jazz, a year with the Cleveland Cavaliers, before Dell landed in Charlotte in 1988 when the Hornets expansion team claimed him. He would stay for a decade, becoming the franchise’s cornerstone outside shooter, winning the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year award in 1994, and retiring as the Hornets’ all-time leading scorer with 9,839 points. Charlotte eventually retired his number 30. He has worked as a television analyst for Hornets broadcasts since retiring from playing.

Charlotte Is Home Now

Dell Curry has said plainly that Charlotte is home, and has been since 1988. The Virginia connection is his roots, even though it’s not his current address: he grew up here, developed here, and launched from here. The Shenandoah Valley isn’t exactly an NBA factory, though. Dell Curry is the Valley’s most prominent contribution to professional basketball, and his story tracks the trajectory that serious athletes from small Valley communities often follow: you get good enough to leave, and then you stay gone.

The Valley that shaped him is still here. Fort Defiance High School still fields a basketball team in Augusta County. The barn his coach owned may or may not still be standing. And somewhere in the career of Steph Curry, the best shooter of his generation, you can trace a line back to a kid working on his mechanics every afternoon in a Grottoes barn, building the muscle memory that would pass, in some form, to the next generation.

The Curry Basketball Family Tree

Dell and his ex-wife Sonya raised their children in Charlotte, and the basketball thread continued. Steph Curry has won multiple NBA championships and MVP awards with the Golden State Warriors; Seth Curry has played for multiple NBA franchises; daughter Sydel played college volleyball and married NBA player Damion Lee. The family’s basketball lineage is by now well-documented. But its Virginia origin point, Harrisonburg, Grottoes, Fort Defiance, a barn in Augusta County, tends to get marginalized in the national narrative about the Currys. This is where it started.

The Shenandoah Valley did not become what it is through a single founding moment or a single group of people. It was assembled, over roughly a century, by people who arrived with different languages, different faiths, and different relationships to authority — and who, despite those differences, built an agricultural society that looked almost nothing like the tobacco-dominated plantation culture of eastern Virginia.

Understanding how the Valley got its character means going back to the roads those settlers traveled to get here.

The Great Wagon Road and the People Who Walked It

The Shenandoah Valley’s first substantial European settlement came from Pennsylvania pushing south. Beginning in the 1730s, a steady flow of immigrants — primarily German Palatines who had first landed in Philadelphia and Scots-Irish Presbyterians who had crossed from Ulster — moved down the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road, following the natural corridor of the Valley floor south through what would become Frederick County, Shenandoah County, Rockingham County, and Augusta County.

Lieutenant Governor William Gooch’s land policy accelerated this movement dramatically. Between 1730 and 1732, Gooch issued land orders totaling close to 400,000 acres west of the Blue Ridge, most of them to Germanic and Scots-Irish recipients from Pennsylvania, on the condition that they recruit one settler family for every thousand acres within two years. The policy was more popular than Gooch expected. By 1735, roughly 160 families had settled the Valley; within a decade, nearly 10,000 Europeans lived there.

Two communities emerged from this migration, and they settled in distinct geographic patterns that are still legible in the Valley’s cultural landscape today. Scots-Irish settlers tended to occupy the eastern portion of the Valley floor, closer to the Blue Ridge, while German settlers occupied the western side, closer to the Allegheny ridgelines — a division documented in Shenandoah County’s own historical records, which note that Germans settled the western Valley from Winchester toward what is now Strasburg, while the Scots-Irish took the eastern half toward Luray. The Germans established Lutheran, Brethren, Dunker, and Mennonite churches; the Scots-Irish built Presbyterian congregations. By the 1770s, Frederick County’s population was roughly one-third German and one-quarter Scots-Irish, with most of the rest English settlers who had arrived later from the Tidewater.

A Different Virginia

It was a stark contrast from what eastern Virginia had become. The Virginia Museum of History and Culture describes the early Valley as a place where German, Scots-Irish, and English settlers established small farms where they grew grain and bred livestock, and was independent from eastern Virginia’s dependence on tobacco and slavery. The established Anglican church that dominated Tidewater religious and social life played almost no role west of the Blue Ridge. The Shenandoah Valley’s settlers were Lutherans, Presbyterians, Mennonites, and Dunkards. Those traditions brought different relationships to community organization, land use, and authority.

This divergence was important when political tensions with Britain began to build in the 1760s and 1770s. The backcountry settlers had less investment in the existing colonial social order than their Tidewater counterparts, and many people had come specifically to escape European systems of social hierarchy. When the Revolution came, the Shenandoah Valley contributed to it in its own distinctive way.

Peter Muhlenberg and the 8th Virginia

The most famous single figure of the Valley’s Revolutionary moment is Peter Muhlenberg, the rector of Beckford Parish in what was then called Dunmore County, now Shenandoah County. Muhlenberg served as one of the county’s delegates to the Virginia Convention, and in January 1776 he returned home with a colonel’s commission to raise a regiment from the Valley and the backcountry.

The 8th Virginia Regiment became known as the German Regiment, reflecting both the ethnic composition of the Valley and the specific recruiting effort Muhlenberg undertook. Ten companies were recruited from eight mostly frontier counties, stretching from the Clinch River Valley near the Cumberland Gap to the Pittsburgh area. Dunmore County raised two of them. The regiment had the distinction of being the only Virginia regiment initially armed entirely with rifles, weapons familiar to the Shenandoah Valley’s hunters and frontiersmen and made locally by craftsmen in Winchester, Staunton, Shepherdstown, and other Valley towns. The regiment fought under Washington across New Jersey in 1776 and 1777 and through the Philadelphia campaign that followed.

The legend that Muhlenberg completed a sermon and then immediately marched off to war has been elaborated over the centuries, but the core of the story is that he was a clergyman who became a colonel, and the Valley communities he represented sent men into the Continental Army from a region that had every reason to identify with the idea of a society organized around something other than inherited privilege.

Hessian Prisoners in Winchester

One of the stranger footnotes to the Shenandoah Valley’s Revolutionary history happened in Winchester, where the Continental Army held prisoners of war — Hessian soldiers, German-speaking mercenaries hired by the British — in barracks built specifically for that purpose. The Handley Regional Library’s archives in Winchester hold original documents from this period, including instructions to the German prisoners for remaining in their barracks, a peculiar mirror image of the German-speaking settlers who had come to the Valley freely two generations earlier.

What the Valley Passed Down

The settlers who arrived in the 1730s and 1740s stayed, and the institutions they built — such as the Presbyterian congregations, the Lutheran and Mennonite churches, the grain farms, the tradition of small-scale independent land ownership — shaped the region’s character in ways that persisted past the Revolution and into the present day. The area’s culture of faith-based community, agricultural self-sufficiency, and a certain wariness of distant authority is not an accident of geography. It’s the inheritance of the people who walked down the Great Wagon Road and decided this was far enough.

Primary historical documentation on Valley settlement and the Revolutionary period is held at the Handley Regional Library in Winchester and the Augusta County Historical Society in Staunton. Encyclopedia Virginia, published by the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, maintains comprehensive entries on the colonial and Revolutionary backcountry.

In January 2026, a 126-page book dropped quietly from Dorrance Publishing: Artists of the Shenandoah Valley: Oil Paintings, Acrylics, Graphites, and Watercolors, put together by Gregory Kujala, a retired physician and Winchester resident who volunteers with Art at the Mill, the biannual juried art show in Millwood. The book’s premise is that there’s a real, working art community here, documented well enough now to fill a gallery on paper, but not particularly well-known outside the region that produced it.

The Institutions Holding It Together

No art community sustains itself without organizational infrastructure, and the Valley has several institutions doing that work quietly and consistently.

The Shenandoah Arts Council (ShenArts) in Winchester is the northern Valley’s primary nonprofit dedicated to making the arts broadly accessible, running exhibitions, events, and outreach programs across the Frederick County and Winchester area. Joan Cestaro, a ShenArts board member, articulated the organization’s challenge plainly when describing its 2024 Art in the Neighborhood initiative: it isn’t always easy for local artists to find affordable, accessible settings to display and sell their work, and ShenArts has been trying to solve that problem for decades.

In the southern Valley, the Shenandoah Valley Art Center (SVAC) in Waynesboro operates as a community art center offering gallery exhibitions, open studios, classes, and a gift shop focused on local and regional artists. Its bluegrass music programming, which includes a monthly jam in its gallery space, reflects the way the region’s art institutions tend to function as general community gathering points rather than narrowly focused exhibition spaces.

Shenandoah County has its own institution in VECCA (the Valley Educational Center for the Creative Arts), a volunteer-run nonprofit founded in 1984 that maintains a gallery, hosts annual student scholarships, runs demo days, and operates an artist-in-residence model that puts working artists in the gallery space Tuesday through Friday. It’s the kind of infrastructure a county of 45,000 people doesn’t always sustain, and VECCA has sustained it for over forty years.

At the anchor end of the region’s museum infrastructure sits the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, which has hosted major solo exhibitions of Valley-specific visual art, including a 2016 show of more than seventy plein-air paintings by Andrei Kushnir, an artist who spent a decade painting Valley landscapes, working outdoors in the tradition of painting on location rather than from photographs or memory. More than 260 Kushnir paintings of the Valley exist; the MSV show brought seventy of them together, covering everything from well-known landmarks to places that matter to locals and are largely invisible to visitors.

What the Landscape Produces

The Valley’s visual art tends to return repeatedly to the same subjects: mountains, farmland, water, the particular quality of light on the ridgelines at different times of year. Plein-air landscape painting has a legitimate tradition here precisely because the landscape is so consistently worth painting, but the most interesting Valley artists tend to be the ones who bring something else to those subjects, a perspective or technique that makes a familiar view feel newly examined rather than simply well-executed.

The Book is a genuinely useful guide to who those artists are right now. Kujala worked from deep local knowledge; Art at the Mill, the show he volunteers with, is a juried event drawing artists from across the region, and his familiarity with that circuit shows in the range of work the book documents, from palette-knife oils to precise graphite to watercolor traditions that have deep roots in the Valley’s arts education programs.

How to Find the Work

The most direct entry point for anyone new to the Valley’s art scene is probably one of the existing juried shows rather than gallery-hopping without context. Art at the Mill in Millwood runs twice yearly on the grounds of the Clarke County Historical Association, with visual and craft artists from across the region. The Shenandoah County tourism office maintains a guide to the county’s artists and artisans that is more genuinely useful than most tourism content, listing specific studios and galleries open to visitors alongside the standard event listings.

The ShenArts council’s Art in the Neighborhood program, which launched in 2024, deliberately routes visitors into residential and commercial spaces in Winchester rather than formal gallery settings, creating a version of an art experience that doesn’t require knowing the right galleries first.

For anyone interested in the deeper documentation: Kujala’s book is available through Dorrance Publishing, and the MSV’s permanent collection and rotating exhibitions remain the best single place in the region to encounter Valley-specific visual art at institutional scale.

VECCA is open to the public in Shenandoah County on Saturdays and Sundays; the Shenandoah Valley Art Center in Waynesboro runs year-round exhibitions. The Museum of the Shenandoah Valley is at 901 Amherst Street in Winchester.

There is a persistent and comfortable myth about the Shenandoah Valley’s relationship to slavery. It goes something like this: the Valley was settled by German and Scots-Irish dissenters who didn’t hold with the plantation system, mixed farming replaced tobacco, and the institution of slavery was therefore less central here than in the Tidewater or Southside. The Valley, in this telling, was a kind of “third South,” different enough from the slave-based plantation economy of eastern Virginia to be considered almost apart from it.

Historians have been taking that myth apart for decades. The more honest story is considerably more complicated, and more important to understand if you want to know what this Valley actually was in the two centuries before the Civil War.

The Numbers

By 1860, on the eve of the war, enslaved people comprised roughly 19 to 20 percent of the Shenandoah Valley’s total population. That figure obscures enormous variation from county to county. Clarke County, in the northern Valley, had an enslaved population that amounted to nearly 47 percent of all residents — a figure closer to Tidewater proportions than to the myth of a mostly free Valley. Augusta County’s enslaved population stood at around 20 percent. Shenandoah County, by contrast, had an enslaved population of roughly 5 percent, reflecting the stronger influence of Mennonite and Brethren communities whose religious traditions explicitly opposed slaveholding.

Jonathan Noyalas, a historian who has written what is now the definitive scholarly account of the subject, states directly in Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era that his work corrects “previous assumptions that slavery was not important to the Valley, and that enslaved people were treated better there than in other parts of the South.” The enslaved population peaked, according to his research, at 26.1 percent of the Valley’s population in 1830 before declining to 20.4 percent by 1860; a decline partly attributable to the domestic slave trade, which moved enslaved people from the upper South to the lower South as Virginia’s economy shifted.

How Slavery Operated Here

The Shenandoah Valley’s version of slavery adapted to its mixed agricultural economy rather than the large-scale plantation model of tobacco or cotton production. Small family farms owned one or a few enslaved people; larger plantations owned many. Across the range of scale, white Valley residents were economically entangled with the institution; not only those who directly held enslaved people but those who interacted with a local economy in which enslaved labor shaped land values, produced goods, and set the cost of agricultural work.

One distinctive feature of Valley slavery was the widespread practice of slave hiring, in which enslaved people were leased from their enslavers to other farms or businesses for set periods, typically a year at a time. A Northern visitor to the Valley in 1847 documented the practice in detail, describing an annual auction on January 1 where enslaved workers were put up to the highest bidder for the year, with the hiring person providing bond with security for the hire payment due at year’s end. This system created economic flexibility for small landowners who couldn’t afford to own enslaved people outright while still allowing them to benefit from enslaved labor during peak agricultural seasons.

At the larger end of the scale, Belle Grove Plantation in Frederick County offers a documented case. When Major Isaac Hite Jr. married Nelly Madison in 1783, her father, James Madison Sr., gifted the couple 15 enslaved people. By the 1810 census, 103 enslaved people lived and worked at Belle Grove, laboring in the fields and in the plantation’s blacksmith shop, gristmill, sawmill, distillery, lime kiln, and quarry. Belle Grove is now a National Historic Landmark open to visitors; its interpretive programming directly addresses this history rather than suppressing it.

A Person Worth Naming

Betheny Veney was born enslaved in Luray, Virginia, and eventually purchased her own freedom in Massachusetts in the 1850s. She later wrote a memoir; one of the relatively rare first-person accounts of enslavement in the Valley’s geographic area. In that account, she described her treatment by one enslaver with a specificity that cuts through comfortable generalization: “She was kind to me, as I then counted kindness, never whipping me or starving me; but it was not what a free-born white child would have found comforting or needful.” The distinction between “kind, as enslaved people counted kindness” and actually free is the distinction that the comfortable myth about Valley slavery consistently papers over.

What Happened During the War

Noyalas’s scholarship focuses heavily on the war years precisely because they created unique conditions in the Valley. Union and Confederate forces fought over this territory repeatedly — Stonewall Jackson’s 1862 Valley Campaign, and Sheridan’s 1864 destruction of the Valley’s agricultural capacity — which meant the region changed hands constantly, sometimes within days. For enslaved people, this created both danger and opportunity. Many escaped during the war, fleeing to Pennsylvania or enlisting in United States Colored Troops regiments or serving Union forces as scouts, laborers, and spies. Noyalas documents these acts not as exceptions but as part of a systematic pattern of enslaved people acting on their own behalf to force the Union to reckon with what emancipation actually meant.

The Valley they left, and in some cases returned to, was different after 1865. It was legally free, but it was also shaped for generations by a century and a half of an economy that had depended on enslaved labor to produce the grain that fed Confederate armies and earned it the name “the Breadbasket of the Confederacy.”

Where to Go From Here

Belle Grove Plantation near Middletown in Frederick County is the most accessible site for engaging with this history directly; the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which manages the property, has developed programming explicitly addressing the enslaved community’s history there. The National Park Service’s Cedar Creek and Belle Grove National Historical Park integrates this history into the battlefield interpretations surrounding the 1864 Battle of Cedar Creek. Jonathan Noyalas’s book remains the most complete single scholarly treatment of the subject and is available through academic libraries and online booksellers.

Before they were playing Ryman Auditorium and winning Grammy Awards, Old Crow Medicine Show was busking on the streets of Harrisonburg. The band got their start here in the late 1990s, playing on the streets of the Friendly City, before moving to Nashville and eventually to wide recognition. The Steel Wheels, the Americana outfit whose sound draws from old-time, folk, and the same Valley musical tradition, also trace their origins to Harrisonburg.

Harrisonburg is a college town with a large university (James Madison University), a walking-distance downtown, and a culture that has consistently made space for live music that is generally seen in a city much bigger than Harrisonburg.

The Levitt AMP Series

The Levitt AMP Harrisonburg Music Series at Turner Pavilion is the city’s highest-profile free outdoor music program, running on summer Wednesday evenings and drawing acts that range from nationally touring Americana and folk performers to regional talent. The 2026 season includes Scott Miller & The Commonwealth, Jason Carter Band, Blair Crimmins & The Hookers, Gentleman Brawlers, and Joslyn & The Sweet Compression. Admission is free. Turner Pavilion’s outdoor setting makes it one of the better ways to spend a summer evening in the Valley without spending money.

The Levitt organization funds free concerts in communities across the country, and Harrisonburg’s version reflects the city’s musical character well: the programming skews roots, Americana, and folk without being exclusively any of those things.

The Listening Rooms and Intimate Venues

Pale Fire Brewing’s taproom on Liberty Street, inside a former icehouse, has developed what Harrisonburg’s tourism bureau describes as a “listening room” aestheti; the space lends itself to singer-songwriter performers and more intimate acoustic sets rather than high-volume band nights. Restless Moons Brewing, housed in a converted car repair garage, also runs regular live music in its back beer garden under string lights, with a booking philosophy focused on local and regional acts. Both are smaller-capacity rooms where a good performer can fill the space without a sound system that overwhelms the room.

The Golden Pony is Harrisonburg’s most established independent live music venue, booking local and touring acts across genres in a setting that has served the city’s music community for years. Clementine Cafe and its late-night bar space below have also maintained a consistent live music program as part of the restaurant’s larger identity as a cultural gathering point.

For formal performance, the Forbes Center for the Performing Arts at JMU offers five acoustically designed venues on campus and brings in a consistently strong calendar of national acts alongside the university’s own productions. The Court Square Theater in downtown Harrisonburg programs concerts and events that fall outside what the larger venues typically book.

The Festivals and Annual Events

The Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival at JMU and the Sing Me High Festival are two recurring events that anchor the city’s musical calendar that is more than the bar and taproom circuit. The annual Virginia Quilt Museum’s Heirloom Markets in nearby Dayton have incorporated live music as a component of their programming as well, reflecting the broader Valley tendency to fold music into community events rather than keeping it siloed in dedicated venues.

Sage Bird Ciderworks on Liberty Street rounds out the downtown music ecosystem with live music alongside its cider and wine program, including karaoke and open mic nights that serve the city’s local musician community rather than exclusively booking touring acts.

Why It Keeps Working

Any honest assessment of why Harrisonburg’s music scene has sustained itself points to the same few factors: a university population large enough to fill rooms on weeknights, a downtown compact enough to make bar and brewery-hopping practical without a car, and a long-established culture of appreciating American roots music that has its specific local expression in the Old Crow Medicine Show and Steel Wheels origin stories. Those stories are part of why musicians who play Harrisonburg understand the audience has been listening to this music for a long time, and knows the difference.

The Levitt AMP Harrisonburg Music Series runs Wednesday evenings through the summer at Turner Pavilion. Current schedules for all venues can be found through the Harrisonburg Tourism live music calendar.