The Long Road to Freedom Trail is a collaboration between the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields National Historic District, the National Park Service American Battlefield Protection Program, and local community groups. It is designed to highlight the amazing history and contributions of African Americans in the region. The Long Road to Freedom Trail contains dozens of sites throughout the eight counties of the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields National Historic District.

African Americans have played a pivotal role in shaping the history and culture of the Shenandoah Valley and our nation. When the Civil War came to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, generations of free and enslaved African Americans had already shaped the Valley’s story. In a war that touched everyone and everything in its path, the African American stories from the Civil War to Civil Rights are rich and varied. Some escaped bondage and joined the Union effort. Others remained rooted in the Valley, where their struggle for full citizenship continued after the war and the constitutional end of slavery. They build prospering, vibrant communities of Black life and culture despite the harsh realities of segregation in Jim Crow Virginia, a system that was not dismantled until the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, a full century after the end of the Civil War.