The book is called When the Parkway Came, and its main story is based on a 1937 letter in the National Archives that I discovered while doing research for Super-Scenic Motorway: A Blue Ridge Parkway History (UNC Press 2006). In the letter, an Ashe County, NC farmer writes to President Roosevelt to ask for help when he learns that the Parkway is going to come through the middle of his farm. When the Parkway Came features a fictionalized account of this family’s experience as told by the farmer’s son to his granddaughter many years later as they travel the Parkway and see where the family farm used to be. To convey the feel of the mountains in the 1930s, the coming of the Parkway, and its stunning beauty, we illustrated the story with contemporary photographs as well as historic photographs and documents. The book is appropriate for approximately ages 7 or so and up. We think it will be something that parents, grandparents, and children will enjoy reading together.

When the Parkway Came was beautifully designed by longtime UNC Press lead book designer Rich Hendel (who also did the design for Super-Scenic Motorway and David’s previous UNC Press books), and we have published it ourselves. We chose to go this route in order both to maintain editorial control (especially over the imagery in the book) and to assure that it would be available in time for the Parkway 75th next year.

The book is being distributed to retail sellers by John F. Blair Publisher in Winston-Salem (visit http://www.blairpub.com/alltitles/whenparkwaycame.htm), but individual orders may be placed directly with us. We have just received the first shipment of books, and have them available for mailing in time for Christmas. More information and a downloadable order form are available at our book website: http://www.whentheparkwaycame.com/.

Lincoln Boyhood Home National Memorial, courtesy National Park Service.

This post isn’t specific to the Blue Ridge Parkway, but I thought readers might be interested in a project that I’m involved in that is taking a comprehensive look at the state of history in the National Parks. Here’s our official blurb about what we’re up to:

(By the way, the photo at left is of Lincoln Boyhood Home National Memorial, courtesy National Park Service.)

The largest learned society devoted to the study of American history, the Organization of American Historians (OAH), has embarked upon a two-year project to evaluate the state of history in the U.S. National Park Service (NPS). The study project began in 2008, under the cooperative agreement between NPS and OAH, under the supervision of the Chief Historian of the National Park Service, Dr. Robert K. Sutton. The project was envisioned by the former Chief Historian, Dr. Dwight T. Pitcaithley, who is now retired from NPS. The final report will be issued in August 2010.

Since the 1930s, when it was given official responsibility for a growing collection of American historical sites, the NPS has been one of the key preservers and presenters of history to the American public. Yet understandings of history, like our knowledge of the natural world, constantly evolve. In order to be effective in its historical mission, the parks need a robust and ongoing research program to undergird sound historic and cultural resources preservation policy and history-based educational and interpretive initiatives. This study will provide unprecedented attention to whether the current practice of history in America’s National Parks is adequate to meet the parks’ – and the public’s – needs.

In the spring of 2008, the OAH appointed a team of four eminent American history scholars, Anne Mitchell Whisnant (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chair), Marla R. Miller (University of Massachusetts at Amherst), Gary B. Nash (UCLA), and David P. Thelen (Indiana University) to conduct the study. Through surveys, interviews with NPS historians and other professionals, and park visits, the team is taking a comprehensive look at historical research and interpretation in parks. The study will focus on questions of how historical research is conducted, supported, fostered, and used in park resource management, planning, interpretation, and education.

The aim of the project is to provide critical feedback on the current practice of history in the NPS and to propose changes that would support improvement in the quality of historical research and interpretation in the parks. The final report will propose best practices for further development of effective park history programs and research projects that will allow NPS staff to employ the most up-to-date tools, insights, and scholarship of the history profession in order to better serve the interests of the American public.

This project has been undertaken under the cooperative agreement originally entered into in 1995 between the NPS and the OAH. To date, the cooperative agreement has sponsored dozens of jointly designed projects. These include critical site reviews, original research, historiographical essays, and suggestions for new interpretive directions. The partnership’s goals are to strengthen NPS history programs and forge working relationships between the NPS and the historical profession to maximize the presentation of the parks’ vast cultural resources for park visitors and the American public.

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The project will be called “Driving through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina” and will be based on the research that I did for Super-Scenic Motorway. I’ll be serving as the scholarly advisor for the undertaking, which will be coordinated by Natasha Smith at the Library. The project will build on some of the technologies developed for the Library’s other GIS-based projects, including “Going to the Show” dnd “North Carolina Maps“. We’ll begin work July 1, 2009!

Here is a blurb about the project, taken from the grant application we submitted:

“‘Driving through Time’ will present an innovative, visually- and spatially-based model for documenting the twentieth-century history of a seventeen-county section of he North Carolina mountains.

The project will feature historic maps, photographs, postcards, government documents, and newspaper clippings, each of which will be assigned geographic coordinates so that it can be viewed on a map, enabling users to visualize and analyze the impact of the Blue Ridge Parkway on the people and landscape in western North Carolina.

Primary sources will be drawn from the collections of the UNC-Chapel Hill University Library, the Blue Ridge Parkway Headquarters, and the North Carolina State Archives. These materials are especially significant in that they document one of North Carolina’s most popular tourist attractions, but also in the way that they help to illuminate the way that the Blue Ridge Parkway transformed the communities through which it passed.

In addition to the digitized primary sources, the project will include scholarly analyses of aspects of the development of the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, and an educational component designed for K-12 teachers and students.

Using digital technologies to open a new window on the history of the Parkway and its region is especially timely considering the approach of the Parkway’s 75th anniversary in 2010 and the National Park Service’s 100th anniversary in 2016.

This project is certain to be a valuable and popular resource for millions of tourists as well as for teachers, students, and historians, both within North Carolina and beyond.”

Part I of the symposium, which will be held April 22-24, 2010 on the campus of Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, is designed to bring together researchers and professionals from all fields who have done new research about the Blue Ridge Parkway in the last 15 years or so. The title of the symposium is “History, Scenery, Conservation, and Community.”

The hope is to bring together everyone who has research findings to share, with the aim of laying a new foundation of knowledge that will undergird decision-making for the Parkway’s next 75 years.

The idea, too, is to begin to create a community among those who have done or are presently engaged in serious research about the Parkway. In my more than 15 years of work, I have repeatedly found out — usually by accident — about someone who was doing interesting and relevant Parkway-related work. Often these professionals were working on some kind of contract for the Park Service, but other times, they were freelance writers or people in fields very different from my own realm of history. It is clear to me that all of us who are doing this work should know each other, share insights, share information about resources, and work together where possible for the good of the Parkway.

The symposium will bring people together across disciplinary boundaries: history, engineering, landscape architecture, anthropology, environmental studies, cultural resource management, and on and on. Managing the Parkway is clearly a task that cannot be done by drawing on the expertise of only one or two areas.

If you have done an interesting research paper, contract project, popular article, master’s thesis, dissertation, journal article, digital project, documentary film, podcast, mapping project, or other undertaking that has incorporated new, original Parkway-related research, please consider submitting a proposal for the symposium. Excellent student work done at the advanced undergraduate or especially at the graduate level will be particularly welcome.

If you know someone who is researching or writing about the Parkway, please forward the link to the call for proposals to them.

Full information about the symposium, including complete details on how to submit a proposal, may be found at the Blue Ridge Parkway 75th Anniversary website.

Please join me in Boone in April 2010!

While the Roanoke Times initially reported that the proposed project was warmly received by Virginia Recreational Facilities Authority board, which controls the Explore site (and has leased it to Vander Maten), and the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors at a presentation on April 28, I was relieved to see that an article two days later noted that some questions were being raised about this preposterous and overinflated plan. Comments on the newspaper’s discussion board also included a number of critiques.

The “Blue Ridge America” resort — complete with luxury spa, “sprawling” riverside village, cable car, swanky hotel, riverside light show pageant, super-big zip line, and golf course — is wildly out of character with the Blue Ridge Parkway. Marketing itself as the “prettiest place on the Parkway,” it would single-handedly redefine what has been for millions of Americans an escape from the “business of life.” This development would implicitly make the Parkway an appalling and sickening promoter for business-driven, man-made extravagance and wealthy self-indulgence. Indeed, the only thing that isn’t new about it is that it represents the latest in a long line of privately-promoted tourism schemes seeking to capitalize on their proximity to America’s most beloved national park site.

Vander Maten admitted as much during his presentation when he noted his hopes to “brand” the site based on its proximity to the Parkway. “That’s the selling experience. . . . I want to take it and make it like a national park on steroids,” the Roanoke Times quoted him as saying.

I’ll be writing more about this in the next little while — there are so many parts of the proposal as projected in the video to take apart that I hardly know where to begin. But the public needs to take a careful look at this before it’s allowed to go forward. With favored direct access to the Parkway, this is a development that could fundamentally change this park and what it’s been about for the last 75 years. Is this the way we want to begin the next 75?

Stay tuned.

Today I’d like to offer a few quick thoughts on a wonderful book I’ve just read about the history of three National Parks in the state of Washington: Mt. Rainier, Olympic, and North Cascades. David Louter’s 2007 Windshield Wilderness: Cars, Roads, and Nautre in Washington’s National Parks (Univ. of Washington Press, which I’ve recently reviewed the NPS publication CRM: Cultural Resources Management) sheds some new and interesting light on the Blue Ridge Parkway’s history and future.

Louter, a historian with the National Park Service’s Pacific West Region, looks at the evolution of each of these three parks, formed at different moments in the twentieth century, with an eye to how the parks accommodated roads and automobiles.

Mt. Ranier, established in 1899, admitted cars in 1908 and developed during a period of enthusiastic park road building championed by first NPS director Stephen Mather. In the 1920s and early 30s, Mather and his successor Horace Albright “transformed parks into landscapes for the highway in nature” (p 36) partly by relying upon landscape architects to fit park highways carefully to the land as part of “master plans” for each park. Nature and wilderness were scenic or visual (rather than ecological) qualities; preservation occurred if the roadside picture appeared natural and roads blended into the landscape.

Mt. Ranier, a product of this period, featured a number of scenic drives, including the Mather Memorial Parkway (completed 1932), by which citizens experienced the park.

Olympic, developed after the late 1930s, reflected a newer notion of wilderness areas as roadless and thus did not feature roads in the park. However, visitors viewed the park mainly via the Hurricane Ridge Road, a scenic route developed with NPS support just outside the park boundaries.

North Cascades, meanwhile, was established in the late 1960s, in the context of the modern environmental movement. The park itself was roadless “wilderness” (by then an official category under the Wilderness Act of 1964), but the adjacent “national recreation areas” contained the familiar scenic roads by which visitors enjoyed the park.

Surveying this history, Louter argues that Americans’ ideas about what National Parks are have been formed by seeing parks through the windshield of a car. The national park system and our automobile-driven highway landscapes grew up together. And although the growth of the environmental movement through the mid-twentieth century brought the notion of roadless “wildnerness” more strongly into the American consciousness and into park management policy, it cannot be denied that most Americans have come to know their parks by driving to, through, or around them.

Thus, although there were always some who considered it an intrusion, for most Americans, the automobile has been an enabling technology, and it has seemed possible that, in parks, automobiles and nature could coexist in harmony. “Cars,” Louter writes, “have been in national parks for more than a century, and it would be hard to imagine parks . . . without cars” (page 164).

All of this is especially interesting as we think about the history of the Blue Ridge Parkway.

First, it casts doubt on the perennial assertion in many a popular publication that the Parkway somehow represented a bold and untested new idea. It’s simply not so. As much as we love it, our beautiful park is product of the great era of scenic road building (1920s/30s) that had already produced many other spectacular park roads like Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park, Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park, the Wawona Road in Yosemite, the Zion-Mt. Carmel Highway in Zion, the Rim Drive in Crater Lake, and Skyline Drive in Shenandoah.

The Parkway’s first landscape architect, Stanley Abbott, came from a long line of landscape architects and engineers who followed Major Hiram M. Chittenden (engineer who supervised road construction in Yellowstone from the 1880s to 1900s) in believing that park roads should be carefully fit to the land to present a carefully-orchestrated series of panoramas.

But the Parkway was in one respect different from these other park roads: while they wound through parks, the Blue Ridge Parkway is the park. The road is the destination.

This presents an interesting conundrum as we consider the crushing environmental impact of cars and begin to see the dawning of a post-automobile age (or at least a post-gasoline-powered automobile age). We can’t make the Blue Ridge Parkway roadless; if the road disappears, the park as we know it disappears. But can we consider whether our Parkway experience must always be mediated through a windshield to retain its value? Are we tethered forever to the idea of “windshield wilderness”?

I don’t know the answers, but the questions are worth thinking about as we try to imagine the Parkway for the next 75 years.

I’ve written an article about the 75th kickoff event which I’ve posted over at National Parks Traveler, in hopes of bringing some national attention to our celebration. Meanwhile, for regular readers of this blog: if you pop over to National Parks Traveler, you’ll find a wealth of excellent information about all of our National Parks.

Recent reports have brought welcome news that the state of North Carolina will purchase about 2600 acres of the spectacular Grandfather Mountain for protection as a public park. It’s about time.

The first effort to make Grandfather a park came in 1917 when owner Hugh MacRae tried to give 1400 acres at the top to the new National Park Service. NPS director Steve Mather rejected the donation, judging the acreage insufficient to protect the park from adjacent development by MacRae’s Linville Improvement Company.

The idea surfaced again in the 1920s, when a federal committee was searching for locations for new eastern national parks. Renewed calls for a Grandfather national park failed to sway the committee, which chose the Great Smokies and Shenandoah instead.

News coverage has portrayed the current purchase as the culmination of Hugh Morton’s lifelong conservation ethic and dreams of preserving Grandfather. No one has acknowledged the deeper history, or noted that this purchase comes almost exactly 60 years after the last serious attempt to buy Grandfather for public preservation.

To the degree that they acknowledge history, the accounts root Morton’s commitment to preserving Grandfather (evident in the 1990s and after) in his 1960s deflection of National Park Service plans to route the Blue Ridge Parkway “over” Grandfather. It is only fitting, these stories imply, that Morton’s descendents have finalized the deal by selling the mountain to the public.

This reading of history has the ring of poetry, of everything turning out as it should. But it’s not that simple.

The archival record makes it abundantly clear that the dream of public ownership for Grandfather was last promoted in the 1940s by conservationists associated with the development of the very Parkway that Morton fought, and that their dream was quashed by none other than Morton himself.

In the 1940s, Morton’s grandfather Hugh MacRae’s company, which had developed Linville, was in a financial crisis, and MacRae and Morton’s father sought to sell the mountain to the Park Service or the state. Worried since the 1930s that company-sponsored timbering was scarring the mountain, government officials welcomed the gesture but did not have money to buy the mountain.

In 1945, national parks supporter Harlan Page Kelsey (a Massachusetts landscape architect with ties to Linville) secured an option to buy 5555 acres for $165,000, with the expectation that the land be incorporated into the Blue Ridge Parkway. In the end, he raised only one pledge, $90,000 from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who had helped to buy land for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

The year after Kelsey’s option expired in 1947, the state tried again to buy the mountain. But young Hugh Morton, by then at the helm of the family business, declared Grandfather not for sale at any price. Instead, he moved to develop a travel attraction there to cultivate “rich crops of tourists.”

Within a few months of inheriting the mountain in 1952, Morton bulldozed a road to one of its peaks, built his “Mile High Swinging Bridge,” and began to harvest his crops.

Three years later, Morton objected to the Park Service’s projected Parkway route at Grandfather, which, contrary to many a popular account, was never planned to go to or over the top of the mountain. But it was nearer his now lucrative summit attraction than he wanted, and he hoped to force it down the mountainside.

Deploying his political clout, media savvy, and support from three North Carolina governors and the state highway bureaucracy, Morton forced the Park Service to accept a lower route in 1968. More than a decade later, the Linn Cove Viaduct – an engineering triumph conceived by federal engineers – was built along part of the new route with no substantive involvement by Morton.

Morton continued until his death to operate the for-profit swinging bridge, nature center, and animal habitats that he had long billed as “Carolina’s Top Scenic Attraction.”

Interestingly, the state’s purchase leaves that revenue-generating portion of the mountain in the hands of Morton’s descendents’ nonprofit organization, which will run it under a state-monitored conservation easement.

Given this history, some questions arise: Is the most accessible section of the public’s new park to remain locked behind a toll gate? Will income generated (at $14 per visitor) underwrite management of the entire park, or only the Morton travel attraction?

And what of the state-Morton family partnership? We should recall that this purchase –some details of which are still unclear – continues a long state-private alliance that repeatedly placed the interests of one individual above the public good. Let us hope that the public’s interests are being better served today.

In the coming days, I will comment on the historical roots of this purchase and the questions the history raises. But for now it is interesting to note that news of this purchase comes almost 60 years to the day after Hugh Morton informed a state commission that was trying to buy Grandfather that the mountain was not for sale “at any price.” The 1940s arrangement, had it gone through, would have put the state in control of more than twice the acreage (5500 acres). The suggested sale price at that time was $180,000.

I welcome the news that (part of) Grandfather Mountain will finally be a publicly owned park. I’m certain that in the next few days this news will be lauded statewide as the great fulfillment of what is said to have been Hugh Morton’s lifelong dream of conserving and protecting the mountain. Indeed, the Charlotte Observer’s story already retreads key elements of the mythical story of the unfolding of this supposed dream, which even cursory examination of the archival record shows to be a distorted reading of actual events.

The long history of Grandfather’s journey to become a public park suggests instead that there are many questions to be asked about the new arrangement and how its benefits will be distributed, and to whom. Stay tuned.

Blue Ridge Parkway 75th Anniversary: Plans for a year 2010 celebration of the 75th anniversary of the beginning of construction are proceeding quickly. A set of kickoff events happening in Roanoke on October 9th and 10th will begin with a symposium I have arranged that will look at how an understanding of the past helps us think about the Parkway’s future. “A Living Past on a Borrowed Landscape: The Blue Ridge Parkway at 75” will inagurate a conversation about the challenges facing the Parkway. We’ll also hope to identify areas where more research about the Parkway is needed; we hope that some of that research will be presented at a larger symposium or conference in 2010. The October 9th discussion is open to the public, and I hope that many of you will plan to attend. Full details about this event and all of the other Parkway 75th kickoff plans are available here.

Now, you may ask: why Roanoke? Well, the 75th anniversary of the Parkway is actually many anniversaries, as there were many events in the 1930s that can be called “the beginning” of the Parkway. The first of those beginnings happened in the fall of 1933 when Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd covened a meeting of representatives from Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee in his Washington office to flesh out what was then a fledgling idea about a parkway to connect Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains national parks. Since Virginia played such a key role in getting the Parkway ball rolling in 1933, it seemed logical that the first activity of the 75th celebration should be based among Virginians.

Blue Ridge Parkway Day at Mast General Stores: I spent last Saturday, September 13th, at the Mast General Store in Asheville, participating in their first-ever Blue Ridge Parkway day! Mast and the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation have partnered to promote stewardship of the Parkway, and Mast generously agreed to donate 10% of their sales proceeds from all of their stores on Saturday the 13th to the Foundation to support the Parkway. Saturday was a gorgeous day, with lots of people out on the streets in Asheville and many shopping at Mast. I enjoyed talking with store visitors about the Parkway and the Foundation, and loved getting to know some of Mast’s Asheville employees, who made me feel right at home. Thanks, Mast!

Talks, Talks, and More Talks: In the next two months, I’m doing seven talks and presentations about the Parkway’s history to groups as varied as the “Village Elders” in Chapel Hill to the Society of North Carolina Archivists meeting in Boone. Come out and see me! The full schedule of my public events is online here.

Whew! There are other projects ongoing as well — stay tuned! For me (to paraphrase Faulkner), the Parkway’s history is never dead; it isn’t even past.

In some recent posts, I’ve been trying to give a historically-informed analysis of the “preliminary alternatives” announced back in the spring for the public’s consideration and commentary to help the Parkway staff write a General Management Plan for the park. Today’s topic? The comments I submitted in response to Question 3. Read the spring 2008 GMP newsletter and learn about the preliminary alternatives here.

Question 3. Are there parts of the preliminary alternatives that you feel strongly should not be included in the future management of the parkway?

I believe strongly that the Parkway needs to move actively and decisively away from many elements of Alternative A (the present management practices), especially in regard to the interpretive and cultural resources management program. In particular, continued management of the road as a place that penetrated a “once remote mountain region” (p. 4, column A), peopled by “quaint Appalachian settlements” commits the Parkway to perpetuating ideas about the Appalachian region that were never grounded in the actual history of the region, and are certainly no longer sustainable in the face of more than nearly forty years of high-quality historical scholarship about the region. That research is readily accessible on the Appalachian Studies Association website, and should be regularly accessed as a primary planning and interpretive resource.

On a related note, in the area of Cultural Resources Management (p. 5), I am concerned about the continued emphasis in all three alternatives on the designation of the parkway corridor as a National Historic Landmark. While I would welcome the recognition of the park’s significance that this designation would imply, I worry that including the original Parkway interpretive exhibits and cultural history sites as part of the “principal components of this designed landscape” (p. 5) would have the effect of freezing the Parkway’s presentation of the region’s history in a pre-1955 time capsule. In other words, because original Parkway designers had (erroneous) ideas about the region’s history and presented a “picturesque” view of that history that was suffused with regional stereotypes, would a National Historic Landmark-designated Parkway be expected to enshrine those erroneous pictures and sites forever in the way that Stanley Abbott or other early designers envisioned them? Or could the historical scenes offered at places like Mabry Mill, the Peaks of Otter, Humpback Rocks, and other similar locations be substantially altered to support historical interpretations more in keeping with current historical scholarship and a more complex view of the region?

Finally, as mentioned previously, I would like to see the Parkway enhance opportunities for lower-impact, physically active recreation (hiking, biking, unicycling!) and de-emphasize further developments for motorized recreation (RVs and motorcycles). In particular, I would be reluctant to see a wholesale re-making of the Parkway campground areas to accommodate large RVs. While I’m not opposed to water and electrical hookups, I think that expanding parking, widening roads, etc (as proposed on p. 7) would fundamentally change the character of Parkway campgrounds, eroding the quietness and serenity of the Parkway experience in favor of a more commercialized camping model. Additionally, as mentioned above, I think accommodating the Parkway to large gas-guzzling vehicles is the wrong focus for limited Parkway funds in an age of high gas prices and increasing environmental concern about the impact of greenhouse gases.

On Wednesday this week, for instance, I got the a link to an article from the Honolulu Advertiser describing funding shortages at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

The article reported on a recent study of the park’s resources by the National Parks Conservation Association, and noted that “Park Superintendent Cindy Orlando said the 333,086-acre park needs 64 more employees, but lacks the money to hire them. The park has about 183 employees, including seasonal workers and staff who work at the park under cooperating agreements with other agencies. ‘Remember, this is not unique to this park,’ Orlando said. ‘It’s a system-wide issue. I think it speaks to the lack of funding for the system.’

Orlando is surely, sadly, right, and good for her for speaking out. As anyone who follows the Blue Ridge Parkway knows, staffing shortages here have in recent years become severe, with our own park down 56 permanent staff members whose positions it does not have the budget to fill. Details on the effects of the Parkway’s budget shortfalls may be found on the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation’s “Parkway Facts” page.

When thinking about the Parkway’s history, it has been important for me always to bear in mind both the local and regional context in which the Parkway came to be, and the national economic and political changes — such as the Depression and New Deal –that profoundly shaped its development.

While the in-process General Management Plan may be dealing with some of those local/regional issues, the Parkway is never going to be the park it could and should be unless the national political situation changes in ways that bring substantial and sustained additional federal funding to our National Park system. For the sake of Hawaii Volcanoes and the Blue Ridge Parkway and all 389 other National Park sites, I fervently hope that the day when that change will come is nearly at hand.

Read the spring 2008 GMP newsletter and learn about the preliminary alternatives here.

Question 2. Which parts of any of the preliminary alternatives to you feel strongly should be included in the futuremanagement of the parkway?

I think there are three key aspects of the preliminary alternatives that should certainly be included in the future management of the Parkway:

(1)A comprehensive sense of the Parkway as a part of the larger region through which it runs, as described in Alternative C. This understanding of the Parkway, I hope, would extend to the interpretive program in ways that are suggested in some of the area descriptions in the “Preliminary Alternatives” document, but are not fully spelled out there. Specifically, I would like to see new interpretive media place the history of the Parkway itself within the context of the stories being told about the region. To do this effectively, a much more complex version of the region’s history – one that includes the story of tourism and the reality of conflict over land use and other related matters – will need to be told.

(2) The regionally-based comprehensive and proactive efforts to coordinate land protection and scenery conservation for the Parkway that are described in Alternative C (p. 4). If “long-term strategies for conserving views” included development of regional zoning ordinances or plans to protect the Parkway, I would favor this as well. Maintaining the Parkway in a piecemeal fashion and taking a primarily reactive approach to encroachments and threats seems likely in the long run to squander enormous staff time and energy in what may be a losing battle.

(3) Expansion of moderate-impact recreational opportunities and development of recreational interconnectedness with the region, especially the creation of multiuse trails and capacity for bicycling, again, as outlined in Alternative C. The Parkway has the potential to be an important venue for physical recreation, and expanding the capacity to accommodate bicycles would attract new audiences to the park and move it away from being seen only or mainly as a place for an automobile-based experience. In the age of high gas prices that may herald the beginning of the end of the gasoline engine and the age of the automobile, it will be important for the Parkway to lead a regional transition to other forms of recreation and, ultimately,

My husband David, and me and our boys biking the 34-mile Virginia Creeper Trail in 2005.)

travel. In addition to the multiuse trails proposed on p. 7 for urbanized areas near the Parkway, I would also like to suggest thinking about whether there are ways to link campground areas by bicycle-friendly connections or create bicycle-friendly areas near campgrounds, further enabling the Parkway to become a destination for all bicycle-oriented travelers, including families with young children. I would prefer, in summary, to see the Parkway’s money and energy spent on developing the Parkway further for non-motorized, lower impact recreation (hiking, biking, etc.) rather than enhancing the Parkway for greater use by motorized vehicles including large RVs (and motorcycles, about which I’ll comment later).

Titled “Not Just a Scenic Road: The Blue Ridge Parkway and Its History,” the workshop features scholarly speakers, Parkway area tours, hands-on experiences with historical documents, and practical sessions on lesson plan development led by master teachers. It focuses on history, politics, culture, race relations, construction, recreation, and the environment. You can read the full schedule here.

This week’s participants (almost evenly divided among elementary, middle school, and high school teachers) arrived from 17 states on Sunday afternoon and soon boarded a bus for a short Parkway drive to the Cascasdes overlook at milepost 272 in Jeffress Park. There, in a gentle rain, Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation Development Director Willa Coffey Mays welcomed the group with watermelon, cookies, and drinks and talked about the importance of public-private partnerships for the National Parks today. Then it was back to Boone for a barbecue picnic and rest in the dorm until the seminar got underway in earnest the next morning.

Project Director Professor Neva Specht, an ASU historian and the official ASU “Blue Ridge Parkway Liaison,” had invited me to deliver an hour-and-a-half opening address on Monday morning and to engage with the teachers in two smaller-group Q&A sessions.

This turned out to be a challenging assignment. On the one hand, I knew that, unlike most of the presentations I do, I would be talking to people who had probably already read my book (they all received a copy as part of their packet of reading materials six weeks ago). I also knew that, with a quarter of the participants being from North Carolina (none this week from Virginia), some would have long histories with the Parkway, while others would be completely new to the region. And I knew that in the afternoon after my talk, the group would be touring Grandfather Mountain, a place where having an informed, critical, historical perspective is crucial to understanding the significance of what is being seen.

After many false starts, I finally built a presentation with four major aims: (1) to probe what had drawn the teachers to this seminar and what they hoped to gain from it; (2) to launch them on what I like to call a “different journey” on the Parkway – one that gets beyond aesthetics, beauty, and design, and develops a critical perspective and an awareness of how conflict over important issues shaped the way the Parkway lies on the land; (3) to prepare them for the outing to Grandfather Mountain (Google Earth was very helpful in this regard!); and (4) to suggest some big ideas that would be transferable from the Parkway context to teaching about many topics. I may post some of this material in future blog entries.

Judging from the comments and discussion that followed the presentation, I think it was successful. At lunchtime, one teacher showed me a Grandfather Mountain ad in a local publication that she saw in a completely new way after knowing more about the history of that site. There is no better reward for teaching than feeling that you have empowered someone else to see something new for themselves.

Probably the most gratifying part of the whole experience for me, though, was that it was happening at all. After I began my Parkway research at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1991 as part of a graduate school seminar paper on the Cherokee opposition to the Parkway, I sought advice from some senior scholars on whether to proceed with a dissertation on the Parkway or on the Eastern Cherokees. One eminent scholar, whose work I respect greatly, advised that I work on the Cherokees, as she thought that there might not be that much else that was interesting to say about a road. I proceeded to ignore this advice, of course, and found that there was a lot to say. And even with my book published, there is still so much more to study, analyze, learn, and know about this road and this park.

“Not Just a Scenic Road,” and the enthusiasm and interest of the 80 teachers and 16 leaders and faculty members who have shaped this program is dramatic evidence of that vague sense of possibility that I had 17 years ago, and, I hope, the beginning of many more serious efforts to understand what this Parkway teaches us about our region and our nation. Thanks to Neva and her colleagues who worked so hard to organize this wonderful and worthwhile experience.

Question 1. Is one of the three preliminary alternatives (A,B,C) already close to your idea of the best way to manage the Blue Ridge Parkway? If so, which one, and how might you modify it to make it closer to your interests and concerns?

Of the three alternatives presented, Alternative C most closely represents my vision for future management of the Blue Ridge Parkway. This approach appeals to me largely because it recognizes and builds upon the Parkway’s historic connectedness to the region through which it winds. Additionally, its flexibility and adaptability honor the Parkway’s past evolution in response to changing times, social pressures, and design ideals.

As a scholar who has spent over 17 years studying the Parkway’s history, I find many elements of Alternative C to be truer to the Parkway’s origins than the plans described for Alternative B. This is the case despite the fact that alternative B is billed as the choice that would emphasize “original parkway design” and “traditional driving experience,” implying that B, not C, is the alternative most in keeping with Parkway history.

Page 4 of the “Preliminary Alternatives” publication notes that Alternative C would entail management of the Parkway “as an experience that is more integrated with the larger region’s resources and economy.” These words would warm the hearts of the citizens of Virginia and North Carolina who lobbied to establish the Parkway in the 1930s. The most prominent of those early Parkway enthusiasts, indeed, were people with close ties to the tourism businesses that already by that time dotted the region and dominated the imaginations of many civic leaders, especially in the Asheville region. Those leaders envisioned the Parkway as a preeminent economic engine for the mountain region, one that would funnel tourists to local hotels and other attractions. Without the energies of these citizens, who made the case that a park-to-park highway was worth New Deal funding and should be routed near Asheville, the Parkway as we know it would not have come into existence. The efforts of state officials in Virginia and North Carolina, furthermore, assured the completion of the land acquisition that created the Parkway corridor. Thus, in many important respects, the Parkway has always been a strongly local and regional – as opposed to purely national – project.

For years after the 1930s, as the National Park Service took firmer control of the project, however, tensions developed between local and regional interests and the Parkway. Often, that was as it should have been; the Park Service had to protect the Parkway boundary and the park from local trespass, misuse, and exploitation by embittered citizens and some of the very tourist interests that had originally supported the park. In many respects, nevertheless, the story of the Parkway from the 1930s has been the story of the Park Service’s attempts to reach a sustainable equilibrium in its relationship with the region.

Adopting Alternative C might be a welcome step toward that desired equilibrium. A flexible, regionally-oriented management plan, it would allow the Parkway to recognize and acknowledge its own role as a player within a larger region, and as a park whose fate is inextricably bound up with that region. Taking this fact as a starting point for management promises a realistic and authentic decision-making process that accounts for the myriad effects that changes in the region continue to have upon the park. Additionally, regionally-oriented thinking about the park offers exciting possibilities for new interpretive directions that would more fully tell the Parkway’s history to the public, as well as helping the public to understand the issues that have continually shaped that history.

Alternative B, meanwhile, proposes that the parkway would continue to be thought of and managed as “a traditional, self-contained, scenic recreational driving experience and designed landscape.” Trying to maintain the parkway as a “self-contained” entity is both out of congruence with the park’s history and unrealistic in light of its present context and challenges. Additionally, past attempts to seal the Parkway off from the region have been the source of many a conflict (witness the 1950s hullabaloo over Parkway tolls and enhanced visitor facilities along the Parkway, discussed in Chapter 7 of Super-Scenic Motorway); working in a more open and collaborative way with regional interests, while challenging, would seem likely to produce greater support for the Parkway in the communities that make up its “borrowed landscape.”

That said, there are three components of Alternative C that I would suggest be modified in order to assure that the flexible, open process does not destroy things that are central to the Parkway’s original purposes or bring changes that substantially degrade the visitor experience:

Concessions: Despite the fact that concessions policy has historically been a source of conflict with regional interests, I would suggest retaining Alternative B’s recommendations for concessions service (“Continue to find ways to provide viable concession services at all existing locations . . .,” page 6). Perhaps there are ways to provide more opportunities for local communities to participate in concessions (farmer’s markets? local foods in restaurants?), but for visitors, especially those who are camping, it would be impractical and frustrating to have to leave the Parkway for every bag of ice or package of marshmallows. Although what is offered in local communities is often extensive, the fact remains that local communities are often a considerable distance from the Parkway recreation areas. In the age of high gas prices and global warming, maintaining some limited concessions facilities on the Parkway seems wise.

Campgrounds: I would suggest retaining Alternative B’s recommendations about RV sites in campgrounds (e.g. “Upgrade existing RV sites in select campgrounds with water and electrical hookups,” p. 7) instead of taking the more expansive approach (especially in terms of widening roads, expanding turning radii, and enlarging parking) to providing for RVs that Alternative C proposes. Nothing about Alternative C’s general approach dictates that the Parkway must pave over more ground to open its campgrounds to huge and ostentatious RVs of whatever size, to the detriment of the quieter, simpler (tent-based) camping experiences that have long been part of the Parkway experience. Again, in an age of rising environmental consciousness, accommodating the Parkway fully to gas-guzzling RVs and other large vehicles seems to send the wrong message and actually work against many of the Parkway’s purposes as identified on p. 2 of the “Preliminary Altneratives” document (including conservation, and “high quality scenic and recreational experiences”).

Partnerships: Although I myself am a member of the Board of a partner organization (Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation), I would urge that the Parkway approach the partnerships portion of Alternative C with caution. As history shows, private entities are all too willing to exploit the Parkway for private gain. Maintaining an appropriate balance that makes room for private partnerships that support the Parkway’s mission while reining in private – especially commercial – interests that (overtly or covertly) subvert the public interest will be an ongoing challenge. Therefore, I would encourage more conservative language about partnerships in Alternative C, perhaps language that is closer to what is in Alternative A.

In conclusion, I advocate adoption of Alternative C, with the caveats that the park staff continue to vigilantly protect the Parkway from private exploitation at the expense of the public interest and retain the quiet, noncommercial experience the Parkway was intended (especially by its early NPS leadership) to provide.

Partly we should care because the Parkway is under legal mandate to have a GMP under the National Parks and Recreation Act of 1978. That act directs all parks to develop a GMP to guide and rationalize park management for a fifteen-to-twenty-year period. Is writing a GMP in part an effort at not-too-sexy-sounding “compliance,” then? Well, yes, but it’s much more important than that implies.

The main reason we should care is that the writing of the GMP – the first the Parkway has ever had – provides us with a key moment to take hold of a Parkway that was given to us by history and make it ours, and our children’s. So far as I am aware, this is almost the first time since the Parkway was finished in the 1980s – and maybe since its earliest days in the 1930s – that there has been a chance to think broadly and systematically about what the essence of this Parkway is, who it should serve, how it should fit into a its ever-changing landscape, and how it should be re-created for a twenty-first century public. And the public has been invited into this conversation in a way they never were in the 1930s. In short, this could be a watershed moment for the Parkway.

Having spent so many years thinking about how the Parkway was created – what the essence of the early Parkway was, who it served, who got to weigh in on its planning, and how it was shaped by its region – I thought I should take time to provide comments on the General Management Plan’s “Preliminary Alternatives” document during the recently closed “public comment” period. You can read the preliminary alternatives for yourself online here.

The final lines of my book remind us that the “ongoing creation of the Blue Ridge Parkway now lies in our hands.” I take that statement seriously and believe I have a responsibility – as a scholar, a citizen, and a lover of this park – to add my voice to those discussing the Parkway’s future. I believe, furthermore, that history does help illuminate our path, and over the next few blog entries, I want to share with you some of the insights history suggested to me about the three proposed alternatives for future Parkway management. The materials are organized as they were submitted – in response to specific questions posed in the planning document. So check back next week for my answer to Question 1: “Is one of the three preliminary alternatives (A,B,C) already close to your idea of the best way to manage the Blue Ridge Parkway? If so, which one, and how might you modify it to make it closer to your interests and concerns?”

But the sources from which a historian works (letters, reports, newspapers) are often mostly verbal, and our understanding of many of the events that those documents record (legislative debates, allocation of funds, administrative decisions, meetings) wouldn’t be helped much if we had supporting visuals.

In other cases, especially in dealing with landscapes like the Parkway, our understanding can be substantially enhanced by being able to see before, during, and after pictures. The problem for the historian is finding the images that document the history among the much more plentiful photographs of Parkway scenery – flowers, vistas, the Mabry Mill, most of which obscure as much as they reveal.

Still, several archival collections have hundreds of relevant historical images, some of which I used in my book. Especially productive were the Blue Ridge Parkway archives in Asheville, the North Carolina Collection at UNC, the special collections department at UNC Asheville, the National Archives in Washington, the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh, and, perhaps most surprisingly, the archive of the Norfolk and Western Railroad at Virginia Tech (found at the last minute via a Google image search). Thank goodness for the Internet!

As I compiled the final set of illustrations for Super-Scenic Motorway, though, I was frustrated that I could not find several images that I knew must exist – and that I knew would confirm some findings that emerged from the documents. What were some of those wished-for images?

1930s timbering at Grandfather Mountain. Many North Carolinians expressed urgent concern about destructive timbering that Champion Paper was doing at Grandfather Mountain in the 1930s. “When we think of the devastation of that beautiful Mt. of God’s special gift to man, being cut down and destroyed by a lumber company, 1930s timbering at Grandfather Mountainfor the sake of gain, we feel that it is a tragedy from which our Mt. country will never recover,” wrote women of the Wise and Other-wise Club of Lenoir, NC to Congressman Robert Doughton in 1933. After a lengthy search, I did find at the Parkway archives several dark images of a timber company plank road through cut trees across Grandfather at that time, but I never could find something that gave a clearer and more panoramic impression of the devastation that was vividly evident to the women of Lenoir and many others.

Photographs of the building of the toll road up Grandfather to the Mile High Swinging Bridge in 1952. I do have two rather grainy photocopies of the blasting that construction of this road required, but nothing that is reproducible or that clearly shows the damage that several key observers said that Hugh Morton’s entrepreneurial project had caused to one of Grandfather’s peaks.

A videotape of a June 1962 joint appearance on WRAL-TV of Hugh Morton and National Park Service Director Conrad L. Wirth in an exchange over the routing of the Parkway at Grandfather Mountain. WRAL claims it has no footage of the broadcast, which several documents said was crucial in turning public opinion against the Park Service.

There is considerable irony in the fact that three of my most-desired images have to do with Grandfather Mountain, whose owner Hugh Morton was one of North Carolina’s most active photographers, and by all odds, its most prolific purveyor of his own preferred pictures of that mountain (the bridge, Mildred the Bear, the Linn Cove Viaduct, etc.).

Fortunately, we now have reason to expect that the images I was looking for and many others will soon emerge from the enormous Hugh Morton photograph collection now being processed by archivists at UNC-Chapel Hill’s North Carolina collection.

Meanwhile, if anyone reading this knows of other locations where any of these images might be, please contact me.

Four or five gunshot wounds were in Catherine D. Bauer when her dead body was found Monday afternoon in a wooded part of the Cherokee Indian Reservation, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department reported Tuesday.

No arrests had been made at the time, the department spokesman said, but he added: `We might have something tomorrow.’

Mrs. Bauer, 74, widow of Fred B. Bauer, was a former school teacher in the Fontana and Brevard school systems. She had moved recently to Cherokee from Brevard. Funeral services were held Tuesday in Brevard.

She reportedly lived alone in a trailer off Soco Road. The body was found in a wooded area off Hyatt Cove Road near the Blue Ridge Parkway, about five miles from where she resided.

This was just one tantalizing tidbit I ran across while doing the research for my book – one of many that ended up relegated to a footnote in the final manuscript. A story that had only tangential relationship to my main narrative, it wasn’t a thread I had the time to pull. Still, I have wondered all these years, what happened to Catherine Bauer?

A cursory search of subsequent days’ papers – which I did conduct after finding this article – revealed no immediate resolution to the question of who killed the dynamic white woman who, with her Cherokee husband Fred Bauer, had in the 1930s galvanized the Cherokee tribe in a five-year campaign against the Blue Ridge Parkway. At that time, Mrs. Bauer had been well known on the Qualla Boundary as a teacher in the local school and the wife of the fiery Vice Chief. Together, they had railed against a project that they characterized as a modern day land grab, part of a larger government plot to return the nation’s Indian peoples to a state of dependency and isolation from mainstream America.

The full story of Cherokee opposition to the Parkway is told in Chapter 5 of my book, but the upshot was that the Bauers’ actions garnered the Cherokees a substantial cash settlement for their Parkway lands and likely prevented the scenic highway from being built along the route where today U.S. 19, the Harrah’s casino, and other substantial private and tribal tourist-oriented development lies. Pushing the Parkway up onto the reservation’s ridges left this valley area available for the Cherokee-generated development that the Bauers preferred to government-sponsored tourism.

After the Parkway battle was resolved, Catherine Bauer and her husband moved away from the Qualla Boundary for many years, and Fred Bauer died in 1971.

How did a woman who had played such an important role in the Eastern Cherokees’ history come to such a sad end? Clues, anyone?

We bought this little device in 1994 because at that time, when I was doing research for my book, the Blue Ridge Parkway’s main collection of historical documents was housed in an abandoned dormitory at Asheville’s VA hospital at Oteen. Archivists everywhere, please stop reading now: you will shudder at the conditions under which these valuable and irreplaceable documents were at that time kept.

The collection (which had been saved from complete oblivion by former Parkway staff member Art Allen, previously the curator for the entire NPS) lived in small third-floor room the size of a university lecture hall. Shelves of hundreds of neatly numbered and labeled gray “Hollinger” (acid-free) archival boxes filled the room. A professional archivist had organized the collection a year or two before and had compiled a spiral-bound description of the materials that provided easy guidance for what would be found there. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, “abandoned building” meant that there was no electricity, no air conditioning or climate control, and no staff on site. The collection was vulnerable to fire, bugs, vandalism, and theft. It also was a challenge for researchers to use.

I did my first Parkway research sitting at a student desk by the window, and later, with the converter in hand, by carrying boxes down to the front porch, where we were in reach of the car’s cigarette lighter.

Phil Noblitt, the Parkway staff person who was at that time in charge of the archives, kindly opened the building for me each day, but had to trust me and my husband to work alone there. Contrast this with the National Archives in Washington, DC – and most other archives these days – where careful registration, security checks, and surveillance cameras are the norm.

Over the years, I have followed the Parkway archives around the mountains. For a while, they left Asheville and went over to the Archives of Appalachia at East Tennessee State University, where I was delighted to find a research room with rocking chairs looking out at a gorgeous mountain view.

Finally, they came back to Asheville, where I visited them two weeks ago at their locked, climate controlled (and freezing cold!) home, which is under direct control of the Parkway.

Meanwhile, I learned that park curator Jackie Holt has been steadily adding new items and consolidating collections. She has brought to the archives historic maps and drawings and issues of the early Parkway publication, the Blue Ridge Parkway News, all of which formerly lived in different offices, and she has been scanning and digitizing other materials. Since I finished my book in 2006, some new early construction reports and superintendent’s annual reports have turned up. The finding aid, which the archivists use to help researchers navigate the collection, is now computerized.

As park archives go, the collection is a very strong one – well organized, full of treasures and valuable early (1930s and 40s) material (including a large photograph collection), and relatively complete. It is well worth the time of any researcher embarking on a Parkway-related project.

But one of the thrills of finally publishing the book I’d worked on so long is finally getting to talk to lots of live people about it! Through a series of book events and conversations with community groups, I’ve been able to meet hundreds of people who are also passionate about the Parkway’s past and future.

A special opportunity to bring past and present together is coming next week (May 20-22) when the University of Virginia will host a conference called “Designing the Parks“, which, its website notes, will examine “the design of buildings and landscapes in the regional, state, and national parks.”

The conference will feature introductory comments from the Director of the National Park Service, Mary Bomar, along with presentations from an impressive array of scholars and park planning, history, and design professionals. On the third day, participants will take tours of the Appalachian Trail; Shenandoah National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway; and the Charlottesville-Gettysburg corridor’s many Civil War sites, Presidential homes, and historic downtowns.

I’m excited about all of this, of course, but especially about my own panel presentation, a conversation with two very knowledgeable colleagues, Ian Firth and Gary W. Johnson, in which we’ll try to link the Parkway’s history and current challenges.

Ian is retired from the faculty in the College of Environment and Design at the University of Georgia, and Gary is a career Park Service veteran and the longtime Chief of the Resource Management Division of the Parkway. For years while I was writing my book, Ian was working on a book-length Historic Resource Study for the Parkway, which surveys the historic design features of the road. Yet we’ve never met. Gary, meanwhile, has been the point person for coping with all of the ongoing challenges that managing the Parkway presents – especially viewshed protection and relations with adjoining landowners.

Our session, “A Borrowed Landscape: Politics, Design and Management of the Blue Ridge Parkway,” will at last bring design, policy, history, and management together into dialogue. And it will fulfill one of my fondest hopes in writing my book: that learning the history might provide insights that would speak to present policy concerns. So many of the struggles the Parkway has today have their roots in the past; history and historians should be talking to managers so that the past can help us think about the future.

But I do like to get out on the Parkway to understand how things relate to each other on the ground. And it is always a thrill to recognize places I have previously seen only in my head while reading documents in the archives.

Sometimes, though, places that still exist so vividly for me in the archives are no longer present on the ground. Archaeologists, of course, specialize on uncovering those places. But historians can do it too.

A few years ago, I was searching the Web for current information about Little Switzerland, a now century-old resort community in Mitchell and McDowell counties in North Carolina – which I was writing about in what became Chapter 4 of my book.

Into the Google search box I typed “Kilmichael Tower,” the name of a stone and wood tourist observation platform that Little Switzerland developer (and NC Supreme Court justice) Heriot Clarkson had built on top of a mountain peak in his development in 1935. I’m not sure what I thought I’d find; the tower, which Clarkson had in the 1930s charged people to climb to see a view, had been closed for years.

In the 1930s, though, Clarkson had gotten into trouble with the Park Service because he insisted on putting up signs on the Parkway right-of-way that directed tourists up a small road from the Parkway to the Tower. A Parkway ranger confiscated the signs, and the whole affair generated a flurry of correspondence that I had discovered in the National Archives. Eventually, though, Clarkson died and the road from the tower to the Parkway was closed.

But what had become of Kilmichael Tower?

Through the magic of the internet, I soon found out. Kilmichael Tower, it turned out, had become a little mountain chalet, owned by someone in Florida and rented out to friends and family. A few emails later, I had arranged for my husband David and me stay there for a weekend.

The place was adorable – a creative reuse of an old structure that had an impressive tall stone base. On Saturday morning, we set out to find the road from the tower to the Parkway. At first it was easy. Just a left turn out of the house, a short walk over toward the ridge, and then we started down what was clearly the old road. It wasn’t long, though, before the rhododendron became tangly and thick. Still you could clearly see the road bed, and we followed it on down. Soon, two sturdy log posts, which I recognized from the old photos as having marked the entrance from the Parkway, came into view. And there, just ahead, was the Parkway.

Driving the Parkway toward Little Switzerland from the south, you would never see this spot unless you already knew it was there. What had once been a sharp cut into the embankment was now eroded and reclaimed by dense undergrowth. Like so much of the other history around the building of the Parkway, this trace of one small but important story has been wiped out of active memory and nearly erased from the landscape. But to a discerning eye, the outlines of that history can still be seen.

As poetic in some ways as it may seem that the memory of this happy event might lift the sad pall that has in recent years settled over “September 11th,” the problem is that construction probably didn’t begin on September 11th.

The marker, I think, is wrong. Documents I found during my 15 years of research for Super-Scenic Motorway suggest that the correct date for the beginning of construction (that is, the moving of the first dirt) is September 19, 1935.

Why do I think this? Because of a discovery I made in the Parkway’s own extensive archival collection in Asheville, NC. There I came upon a copy of a letter sent on September 21, 1935 by J.P. Dodge, Senior Claim Adjuster for the North Carolina State Highway Commission, to the Chair of the Highway Commission. Dodge was the North Carolina official on the scene as the Parkway got underway.

“Representing you and the people of the State of North Carolina,” Dodge wrote, “I ordered the first breaking of ground on the first project of the Shenandoah-Great Smoky Mountains National Parkway on Thursday, September 19, 1935, at the Low Gap of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The work is progressing.” You can read an original copy of this letter and of many of the other documents mentioned below on the documents section of my personal web page for Super-Scenic Motorway.

This sounds pretty definitive, but in 1985, longtime Parkway historian Harley E. Jolley published a book titled Blue Ridge Parkway: The First 50 Years,” in which he fingered September 11th as the date when contractor Nello Teer’s “crew turned the first shovel of dirt and the Parkway’s construction officially began.”

I decided to investigate the discrepancy by searching newspapers and clipping files and my own database of over 4000 items to home in on what was happening during that week in September 1935.

An article from the Alleghany Times on September 12th was titled “Work on Scenic Parkway Link to Begin Very Soon,” and noted that on September 11, workers with Teer’s company unloaded “several car loads” of heavy machinery from the train at Galax, Virginia. The Mt. Airy News added on September 19th that “Parkway Work Started Monday above Lowgap.” A perpetual calendar reveals that “Monday” would have been September 16th. That day, 100 men deployed the new machinery and cleared brush and timber along the right-of-way. Finally, agreeing with Mr. Dodge, the Skyland Post on October 3, 1935 reported that “first dirt was moved in construction of the Parkway on September 19.”

Apparently, then, the week of September 11-18 was spent getting the equipment and men in place and the right-of-way cleared in order to start construction on the 19th.

I emailed Michael Hill, the Research Supervisor at the NC Office of Archives and History in Raleigh, who manages the State Highway Historical Markers program, and asked what documents they had on file to support putting September 11 on the marker. After all, according to the state’s procedures, a committee of historians has to be convinced that a site is legitimate and the data correct before they decide put up an expensive metal sign.

Hill told me that the marker was erected in 1988, and that supporting documents included a letter from then-Superintendent Gary Everhardt, citing Harley Jolley’s work. He noted that in designating dates for institutional histories, the commission is often “guided by administrators in identifying which evidence to accept,” and he invited me to come to Raleigh to review any more information they might have on file.

And if one were to want to propose a change in a marker? I’d have to write Hill a letter, which, to be most effective, would need to be bolstered by a letter from current Parkway Superintendent Phil Francis encouraging the change.

Sending the existing sign back to the foundry in Ohio for correction of one numeral would cost $750, while a completely new sign would cost $1585.

Changing a historical monument would not, of course, be an unprecedented act. The historical markers and sites that dot our landscape are products of people and times – and they can and should always be questioned in the light of new information or new understandings. Despite the fact that the structures or monuments themselves may be forged in iron or stone, the facts that are presented on them are not. James Loewen has written an entire book – Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong – about the erroneous history presented by many historical monuments.

So, given all of this, and given the approach of yet another anniversary, should the sign be changed, or should we leave it alone?

One of our first discussions, of course, was “when is the 75th anniversary?” You would think this would be easy to answer, but it’s not. It’s just one of the Parkway’s “many stories.”

So, when was the Parkway born?

Well, setting aside for a moment precursor roads like Joseph Hyde Pratt’s proposed Crest of the Blue Ridge Highway (1909-12), the Parkway we know certainly began to take shape in 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal began providing funds for big public works projects that would stimulate the economy and generate employment.

With that background, there are at least three credible candidates for the Parkway’s birthday, if you look for dates on which concrete actions were taken that assured that the Parkway idea would become a reality:

• November 16, 1933, when Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes approved the future Blue Ridge Parkway for federal funding under the Public Works Administration.
• September 19, 1935, when, according to a latter from J.P. Dodge, Senior Claim Adjuster for the North Carolina Highway Commission, to the Chair of the Highway Commission, the “first breaking of ground on the first project of the Shenandoah- Great Smoky Mountains National Parkway” took place at Low Gap, NC.
• June 30, 1936, when a federal statute named the road the “Blue Ridge Parkway” and placed it under the control of the National Park Service.

Following its precursors, Blue Ridge Parkway 75 has honed in on the “beginning of construction” date (1935 above) as the Parkway’s official birthday. And in a sense, that’s fine. The point of the celebration is not to split historical hairs, but to focus attention on the inspiring accomplishment the Parkway represents and to spur public action to protect it for the future.

But splitting this historical hair does remind us: big and complicated projects like the Parkway almost never get born on a single day. They are almost always the culmination of weeks, months, and years of planning and thinking that eventually coalesce into some kind of final product. Similarly, they are usually not created by a single mind or a single hand. Many people made the Parkway, and it will take the ideas and energy of all of us, talking, planning, and thinking, to envision and build its future.

Watch this space for more about the 75th and look for ways that you can get involved.

And each of us may experience the Parkway differently at different times. I first went there as child in the 1970s and 1980s – in the back seat of my parents’ Buick Century. Devil’s Courthouse was a favorite place for hikes then.

Going again later, as a college student waiting tables for the summer at Lake Junaluska Assembly, was a different experience. As college students will do, I tended to go up fairly late at night – part of what I’ve come to learn is a long stream of people “courting” on the Parkway. We won’t get into too much detail about that here!

It was only once I’d gone to graduate school to do a Ph.D. in history that I began to think historically about the Parkway.Super-Scenic Motorway book jacket

What do I mean by “think historically”? That’s part of what I’ll try to explain in this blog. I’ll be looking at the Parkway from the point of view of someone who has spent now more than 15 years studying the beloved road’s past – work that culminated in my 2006 book, Super-Scenic Motorway: A Blue Ridge Parkway History (University of North Carolina Press).

What, then, is a “historian’s Parkway”? What do you see when you think historically about this place?

• You see that the Parkway is a human creation. Yes, it is the natural environment of the mountains that makes it special, but mountains alone do not a public Parkway make. Without specific actions and decisions by specific people at particular times, there would be no Parkway.
• You see that the Parkway as it now is, is one possible choice among many. There was nothing foreordained about there being a scenic parkway like this one in the southern Appalachians. There were other ways to build roads; there were other places to build them. Deciding to put this kind of road in this particular place meant choosing some options over others.
• You see the Parkway as many Parkways, the “Parkway Story” as many stories. It had to be. After all, it was built over a 52-year period through 29 quite varied counties in Virginia and North Carolina. It pierces the lands of thousands of individual landowners. It was the creation of many hands. Design vision evolved, and political and social contexts changed. Landscapes differ markedly from place to place, and each local community along the road had its own experiences with it.
• You see yourself as part of a continuum between past and present. You recognize that whatever the Parkway is and was, it is a legacy passed to us by a generation now mostly dead. They made the decisions that brought it into being, but we are not that different from them, as we will make the decisions that keep it vital. Surely as it links the Great Smoky Mountains and the Shenandoah National Parks, the Parkway joins us to all those who came before and will come after.

I hope you’ll come along with me as we peer over at some historic “overlooks” and think about what they can teach us about the Parkway in our times.