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King and Queen County was established in 1691 from New Kent County, and was named for King William III and Queen Mary II of England. King and Queen County is notable as one of the few counties in the United States to have recorded a larger population in the 1790 census than in the 2010 one.
Among the earliest settlers of King and Queen County was Roger Shackelford, an English emigrant from Old Alresford, Hampshire, after whom the county's village of Shacklefords is named. Shackelford's descendants continued to live in the county, and by the nineteenth century had intermarried with several local families, including Taliaferro, Beverley, Thornton, and Sears.
In 1762 when he was 11, future president James Madison was sent to a boarding school run by Donald Robertson at the Innes plantation in King and Queen County. Robertson was a Scottish teacher who tutored numerous prominent plantation families in the South. From Robertson, Madison learned mathematics, geography, and modern and classical languages, becoming especially proficient in Latin. He attributed his instinct for learning "largely to that man (Robertson)." At age 16, Madison returned to his father's Montpelier estate in Orange County.
On March 2, 1864, the Battle of Walkerton, an engagement of the American Civil War, took place here, resulting in a Confederate victory.
Virginia Longest, national director of the Nursing Service for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in the late 1970s, was a county native.
Richard and Mildred Loving lived in a remote part of the county in the 1960s, hoping to avoid arrest by the authorities while their legal challenge to Virginia's anti-miscegenation laws moved through the courts.
For many years, county publications noted that the county lacked any traffic lights. This is now no longer the case, as a traffic light has been installed on U.S. Route 360 at St. Stephen's Church.
Even in the 21st century, King and Queen County contains no incorporated towns or cities, and remains one of Virginia's most sparsely populated counties.
This project is a table of contents for all projects relating to this County of Virginia. Please feel free to add profiles of anyone who was born, lived or died in this county.