At the end of the nineteenth century, Marshall, Virginia, was a one-street town, as it largely remains today. For about one mile on the road between Delaplane to the west and The Plains to the east, one-half acre lots faced each other across Main Street. Main Street was narrow and unpaved, but gracious and lined with mature shade trees. Most of the houses and buildings had porches, many ornately carved with latticed railings in the then-fashionable Victorian style. The trees and porches have long since been lost, fallen to the widening and paving of what is now Virginia Route 55.

At the east edge of the town, Rectortown Road ran to the north, with only two houses on it. To the south at the same point the Warrenton Road had two buildings facing each other, Trinity Episcopal Church on the east side of the road and the Salem Academy on the west. This latter building housed a school; it was originally built in 1771 as a Baptist meeting house, and the Baptist graveyard served as the playground for the school. East of Marshall was a community known as Rosstown settled by former slaves freed after the Civil War.

Marshall was chartered by the General Assembly of Virginia on December 14, 1796, as Salem. To avoid confusion with another, larger Salem in Roanoke County, the postoffice referred to the town as Salem-Fauquier, a cumbersome designation never used by the villagers. At the insistence of the postal authorities, the townspeople met in December 1881 to choose a new name for the town. As he was about to leave for the meeting, Philip Klipstein, one of the town’s leading businessmen and a descendant of a Hessian soldier who had remained in Virginia after his Revolutionary War capture, asked his wife if she had suggestions for a name. She suggested the name of Marshall, honoring Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, whose home was three miles west of the town. Klipstein offered the suggestion at the town meeting, where it was accepted, and the demands of the postal authorities were met. On March 9, 1882, the name change became official. Fauquier County, in which Marshall sits, had been named for Francis Fauquier, Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, in 1759.