Slavery shaped political, economic, and cultural life in America, and in Montgomery County enslaved men and women, though denied freedom, made important contributions. From the county’s earliest days, many enslaved people lived there and worked its farmland. The Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, built in 1854 with slave labor, expanded access to agricultural markets and increased reliance on slave labor. By 1860, 2,219 men, women, and children were enslaved in Montgomery County, a 51 percent increase over 1850. Enslaved people were bought and sold at auction or transferred through inheritance within extended slave-owning families. In 1860, 18.5 percent of white Montgomery County households owned at least one enslaved person, and twenty-three individuals, including members of the Kent, Preston, Staples, Montague, and Wade families, together held more than one-third of all enslaved people in the county. Families were often separated by sale, as remembered in accounts of Mary Brown’s sons being sold after her owner’s death and of enslaved people being kept in the jail behind the courthouse before auctions on the Town Square in Christiansburg. Slave traders also passed through the county regularly, especially after 1850. After Emancipation, the Brown family remained for a time on the plantation where they had been enslaved, working for board and clothing until they could find housing and employment elsewhere.