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.

[4] 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.

"[5][6] 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.