Harrisonburg

Harrisonburg is an independent city in the Shenandoah Valley region of the Commonwealth of Virginia, United States. It is also the county seat of the surrounding Rockingham County, although the two are separate jurisdictions. At the 2020 census, the population was 51,814. The Bureau of Economic Analysis combines the city of Harrisonburg with Rockingham County for statistical purposes into the Harrisonburg, Virginia Metropolitan Statistical Area, which had an estimated population of 126,562 in 2011.

Harrisonburg is home to James Madison University (JMU), a public research university with an enrollment of over 20,000 students, and Eastern Mennonite University (EMU), a private, Mennonite-affiliated liberal arts university, with an enrollment of approximately 2,000 students. Although the city has no historical association with President James Madison, JMU was nonetheless named in his honor as Madison College in 1938 and renamed as James Madison University in 1977. EMU largely owes its existence to the sizable Mennonite population in the Shenandoah Valley, to which many Pennsylvania Dutch settlers arrived beginning in the mid-18th century in search of rich, unsettled farmland.