Blue Ridge Parkway Journeys

The Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation Store is pleased to announce a new book available on our website. “When the Parkway Came” is the first-ever children’s book about the Blue Ridge Parkway. It is written by our friend and fellow blog author, Anne Mitchell Whisnant and her husband David. They hope this book will inspire us all to share our Parkway stories with our children and grandchildren for years to come. Read more about the book in this letter from authors Anne and David.

We wrote this book to share some of the joy we have had traveling and learning about the Parkway with our two young sons while Anne was researching and writing (and later speaking about) her book, Super-Scenic Motorway: A Blue Ridge Parkway History (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). We were surprised to find that there had never been a book on the Parkway written for children and young people. We wanted to find a way to engage, delight and help a new generation of travelers understand the Parkway’s history and commit to preserving the road.

As a starting point for the book, we took a letter that an Ashe County, North Carolina farmer wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression years of the 1930s, which Anne found preserved in the National Archives. The letter described how the farmer’s land lay in the path of the Parkway, then under construction. Spinning a fictional story from that letter, we wrote “When the Parkway Came“. In the book, the farmer’s son — now a grandfather himself — shows his granddaughter Ginny where the Parkway passes through what used to be his family’s land. He remembers how losing part of their farm made the whole family sad, but he tells her how proud he is of the beautiful Parkway that now belongs to everyone.

In writing the book we had to figure out how to tell a story about one family that would personalize and illustrate larger issues faced by many: the hardships of the Depression, the visions and hopes of Parkway designers and proponents, the benefits brought to the mountains by Parkway jobs, and the wrenching challenges of balancing private property rights and a larger public good. To make those issues accessible and compelling for young readers and to introduce the primary sources from which we learn about history, we illustrated the book with historical photographs, documents and advertisements as well as contemporary color photographs. We hope that this approach will make it a book that will appeal to young readers and also to their parents and grandparents. We would love to see it help families talk about their own memories of “when the Parkway came” and their own hopes for its future.