An action-planning workshop building on community input gathered during the Parkway’s 75th Anniversary.

November 15—17, 2011
Crossroads Institute
Galax, Virginia

Make plans now to participate in this 3-day workshop that will provide community and business leaders with an opportunity to turn ideas gathered during the Parkway’s 75th Anniversary into action and to explore significant issues facing the region. Through case studies, presentations, exercises and work sessions, participants will develop work plans for regional implementation. Based on the highly acclaimed Gateway Training Workshops and planned in conjunction with The Conservation Fund.

Workshop Highlights:

• Examine Case Studies of Innovative Partnerships between Public Lands and Partners
• Identify Regional Collaborative Strategies
• Introduction of New Economic Impact and Vitality Index Tools
• Protect Community Character (featuring public presentation by Ed McMahon)
• Access Information regarding Financing Strategies
• Explore Interdisciplinary Approach to Strategic Conservation Planning
• Participate in Action Planning Work with Parkway Staff
• Identify Regional Approaches to Wayfinding and Connectivity

Potential Participants Include:

• Community Leaders
• Engaged Citizens
• Elected Officials
• Business Owners
• Tourism Partners
• Planning Council Members
• Parks and Recreation Managers
• Land Managers
• Economic Development Professionals
• Anyone interested in Community Development

Important Dates to Remember:

September 30—Participant Applications Due
October 10—Confirmation of workshop acceptance

Direct Questions or Scholarship Inquiries to:
Leesa Brandon, Community & Partnerships Coordinator, Blue Ridge Parkway—828.348.3420 or send an email.

Purchase 1 serigraph for 10% off at $67.50 (regular $75.00), or purchase 2 or more serigraphs for 15% off at $63.75 each. Save on your 75th Anniversary Serigraph today!

Sale ends at 11:59 pm, Friday, February 11, 2011.

This official 75th Anniversary product is now available online at the Virtual Blue Ridge Bookstore and in visitor centers along the Parkway.

Don’t forget that proceeds from the sale of all 75th Anniversary products directly benefit the Blue Ridge Parkway and BRP 75th Anniversary programs.

Purchase your patch online today!

Other Official 75th Anniversary products include:

• Signed and Limited Edition Serigraph
• Lapel Pins
• Apparel
• Coasters and Mug
• Fleece Throw Blanket
• Hiking Stick Medallion

» Browse all Official Blue Ridge Parkway 75th Anniversary merchandise

Throughout his tenure with the NPS Phil has received numerous awards and recognitions including winning the Department of Interior’s Meritorious Award, being listed in the Congressional Record in 2006, and having a new species to science named after him by the Discover Life in America organization in appreciation for his support of their projects.

Growing up in Grover, NC, Phil then traveled to Clemson University where he receievd a BS in Administrative Management. Phil is currently married to Dr. Becky Nichols, a scientist with Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

In an interview with the Blue Ridge Parkway 75th, Inc, Phil answers these important questions regarding the past, present and future of the Blue Ridge Parkway.

• Where did the idea for the Blue Ridge Parkway originate?
• Why is the Blue Ridge Parkway important?
• What is a National Park Service “unit”?
• As the Parkway enters its 75th year, what are the biggest challenges it faces?
• What’s the most exciting thing about the Parkway’s 75th Anniversary?

Read Phil’s answers in the full interview published on Virtual Blue Ridge.

L-R: Leesa Brandon, executive director of Blue Ridge Parkway 75 Inc; Anne Whisnant, author-historian and Foundation trustee; Parkway Superintendent Phil Francis; Senator Joe Sam Queen; Houck Medford, Foundation executive director.

A co-operative and non-partisan tour de force of North Carolina senators and representatives has resulted in recognition for the Blue Ridge Parkway’s 75th anniversary. Bill sponsors, Representatives Rapp, Tarleton, Haire, and Frye commended to the general house body on June 29 House Bill 1655, a resolution honoring the 75th anniversary of the Blue Ridge Parkway. All the primary house bill sponsors spoke eloquently on the floor in favor of the bill. It passed unanimously and was carried by special courier to the senate which was also meeting in evening session.

The bill was commended by Senators Queen and Goss. The resolution passed unanimously.

Attending from the National Park Service and Parkway partner groups were Reid Wilson, Conservation Trust for North Carolina; Anne Whisnant, the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation; Leesa Brandon, Blue Ridge Parkway 75th, Inc,; Houck Medford, Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation; and Superintendent Phil Francis.

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!

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.

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.

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.