The earliest records mentioning a settlement in the area date to 1716, when Governor
Alexander Spotswood ventured west of the
Blue Ridge Mountains on the
Knights of the Golden Horseshoe Expedition. The first European-American to settle permanently in the area was
Adam Miller (Mueller) (1703–1783), a native of Germany who arrived in 1726 and made his homestead near present-day Elkton. Later, several German and Dutch immigrants moved into the area. and a village began to grow up around the Upper Peaked Mountain Church, which had been established in the vicinity. Records from 1758 reveal that a Lutheran preacher, Reverend Lawrence Wartman, originally from
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania was preaching in the McGaheysville area who had likely arrived the year before in 1757. He is widely believed to have been the first Lutheran preacher who settled in Rockingham County. McGaheysville saw almost no action in the
American Civil War, save for a
skirmish during the
Shenandoah Valley Campaign, on April 27, 1862, involving one section of an
artillery battery of
New York Militia; it is, however, located near to the site of the
Battle of Cross Keys, and consequently soldiers from both the
Union Army and the
Confederate Army passed through during the campaign. March 6, 1878, the
lynching of Charlotte Harris by a mob of white men occurred just outside of McGaheysville. The murder of Harris is the only documented instance of a Black woman being lynched in Virginia's history. ==Geography==