Virginia State Route 55
State highway in northern Virginia, US
State Route 55 (SR 55) is a primary state highway in the U.S. state of Virginia. Known for most of its length as John Marshall Highway, the state highway runs 64.71 miles (104.14 km) from the West Virginia state line, where the highway continues as West Virginia Route 55 (WV 55), east to U.S. Route 29 (US 29) in Gainesville. West of its interchange with Interstate 81 (I-81) in Strasburg, SR 55 runs concurrently with the easternmost portion of US 48 as part of Corridor H. East of Front Royal, the state highway serves as the local complement of I-66 as it passes through the towns of Marshall, The Plains, and Haymarket.
Most of SR 55 is a Virginia Byway.
Route description
SR 55 begins at the West Virginia state line at the highway's summit of Great North Mountain. The highway continues west toward Wardensville as US 48 and WV 55. SR 55 heads northeast as two-lane undivided Wardensville Pike through George Washington National Forest and descends the mountain to the hamlet of Star Tannery, where the highway leaves Frederick County by crossing Cedar Creek. The state highway, now named John Marshall Highway, passes around the northern end of Little North Mountain near the community of Wheatfield, where the highway turns south. SR 55 passes through the Shenandoah County communities of Lebanon Church and Clary on its way to a diamond interchange with I-81, which serves as US 48's eastern terminus. SR 55 continues south into the town of Strasburg, where the highway has a short concurrency with US 11 on Massanutten Street and passes under Norfolk Southern Railway's B-Line, which it crosses several more times due to the B-Line’s similar route, ending in Manassas.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Virginia State Route 55” as state highway in northern Virginia, US. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as state highway in northern Virginia, US. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 18, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q2507707. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Virginia State Route 55” 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.