Blog Contributor: Anne Mitchell Whisnant
For several years now, the staff at the Blue Ridge Parkway has been working on writing a General Management Plan. Before you start yawning, let me explain a bit: what is a General Management Plan, and why should we care?
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. Read more »
When local people dubbed it “The Scenic” in the 1930s, they recognized what all of us realize – that the Parkway is an intensely visual experience. “See” is the first syllable in “scenic.”
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. Read more »
The January 3, 1979 Asheville Citizen-Times story was brief and sterile:
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? Read more »
I am writing this post while riding along in my family’s minivan, my computer plugged into the cigarette lighter via a DC/AC converter my husband and I bought when I was doing some early Parkway research.
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. Read more »
Writing a book of history can often be an intensely solitary process. Hours alone in the archives, communing with long-dead people as your only companions. I know I’ve had a running conversation in my head with Parkway location engineer R. Getty Browning, dead since the late 1960s, but as alive to me as many of the real people in my world. More on him in a future post.
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. Read more »
