Shenandoah Valley
Region of Virginia and West Virginia

The Shenandoah Valley is a geographic valley and cultural region of western Virginia and the eastern panhandle of West Virginia in the United States. The Valley is bounded to the east by the Blue Ridge Mountains, to the west by the eastern front of the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians, to the north by the Potomac River, to the south by the James River, and to the Southwest by the New River Valley. The cultural region covers a larger area that includes all of the Valley plus the Virginia Highlands to the west and the Roanoke Valley to the south. It is physiographically located within the Ridge and Valley Province and is a portion of the Great Appalachian Valley.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Shenandoah Valley” as region of Virginia and West Virginia. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as region of Virginia and West Virginia. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026.
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This entry incorporates text from “Shenandoah Valley” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.