In this and the next several posts, I'm trying to give a historically-informed analysis of the "preliminary alternatives" recently announced for the public's consideration and commentary to help the Parkway staff writes a General Management Plan for the park. Today's topic? The comments I submitted in response to Question 1. Read the spring 2008 GMP newsletter and learn about the preliminary alternatives here.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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, for 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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
People often ask me - where is your favorite (fill in the blank: camping spot, hiking trail, place to eat, place to stay) along the Parkway. While I do have some recommendations, I'm not as good a source about things like this as some other people like author Danny Bernstein who have written books about being outdoors. People forget that a lot of a historian's time is spent sitting in libraries and archives, and if you're working on the Parkway, that means a lot of hours in Raleigh, Richmond, and Washington, DC.
A North Carolina state historical marker (#M-49), located on the Parkway in Alleghany County, NC near Cumberland Knob park says the following: "BLUE RIDGE PARKWAY: First rural national parkway. Construction began near here on September 11, 1935."
The Blue Ridge Parkway's 75th anniversary is coming up in 2010. Like in 1985, when its 50th anniversary was celebrated, a two-state planning group has been formed to coordinate the festivities. "Blue Ridge Parkway 75, Inc." consists of perhaps thirty board members - of which I am one - drawn from Parkway communities and partner organizations.
Drivers, hikers, bikers, lovers, photographers, engineers, landscape designers, neighboring landowners, farmers, philanthropists, politicians, business owners - there are almost as many perspectives on the Parkway as there are travelers.
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 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.
was delighted to find a research room with rocking chairs looking out
at a gorgeous mountain view.