Skyline Drive & Shenandoah National Park

Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park is a scenic road tied to the “See America First” movement of the early 20th century. The acquisition of land for the project was difficult, and displaced many families from their homes.

Research:

• Harrison, Sarah Georgia. “The Skyline Drive: A Western Park Road in the East.” From Parkways: Past, Present and Future. International Linear Parks Conference. Appalachian State University. (1987). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1xp3kv8.13
• Jolley, Harley E., “Blue Ridge Parkway: The First 50 Years,” Appalachian State University Libraries Digital Collections, accessed May 14, 2025, https://omeka.library.appstate.edu/items/show/43667.
• Jones, Jenny. “Skyline Drive: Engineered with Nature In Mind.” Civil Engineering. April 2001.
• Kyle, Robert. “The Dark Side of Skyline Drive.” Washington Post. 10/17/1993.
• Miles, Kathryn. “Shenandoah National Park Is Confronting Its History.” Outside. 9/23/2019. https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/hiking-and-backpacking/shenandoah-national-park-segregation-history/
• Nash, Carole. “Native American Communities of the Shenandoah Valley: Constructing a Complex History.” 2020. https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.lib.jmu.edu/dist/9/133/files/2019/04/Native-American-Communities-of-the-Shenandoah-Valley.pdf
• National Park Service. “Shenandoah National Park: Skyline Drive: Virginia.” From Highways in Harmony online books exhibit. https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/hih/shenandoah/index.htm
• Roberts, Brett G. “Returning the Land: Native Americans and National Parks.” Ave Maria Law Review 148 (Spring, 2023). https://www.avemarialaw.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/v21.Roberts.final38.pdf
• Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. “The Dedication of Shenandoah National Park.” https://drive.google.com/file/d/134q1Gkk6Af0zl6bb_wekgqs0k2Wt9VPT/view
• Simmons, Dennis E. “Conservation, Cooperation, and Controversy: The Establishment of Shenandoah National Park, 1924-1936.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography , Oct., 1981. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4248512
• S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration. “America's Highways 1776-1976.” U.S. Government Printing Office. https://archive.org/details/AmericasHighways1776-1976
• Zeller, Thomas. “Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters.” Johns Hopkins University Press. 2022. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/book.103002

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. I went on a trip
to Asheville, North Carolina, a couple of weeks ago. That's
always been one of my favorite places, but I don't

(00:23):
think I had been back there since moving to Massachusetts.
Parts of that whole region have only barely started to
recover from Hurricane Helene, which weakened to a tropical storm
as it moved over Georgia, but it still produced truly
devastating destruction in the southern Appalachian Mountains. But while I

(00:44):
was there, I talked to a lot of people who
worked in hotels and restaurants and shops and galleries around Asheville,
and they were all very anxious for tourism to get
back toward its normal levels there. One of the things
that I did on this trip was I drove the
small stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway that is open
near Asheville. At this point, I stopped at the Folk

(01:06):
Arts Center, which is at one end of that open section,
and there was a historical display outside about construction of
the Blue Ridge Parkway that made me think, you know,
that might be a really good episode. The Blue Ridge
Parkway was inspired by another kind of similar scenic drive,
which is Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park, which the

(01:30):
Blue Ridge Parkway also connects to. So my plan was
to have an episode where we talked a little bit
about Skyline Drive and then focused the rest of the
time on the Blue Ridge Parkway. But during my whole
note taking process, Skyline Drive and Shenandoah National Park evolved
into their own entire episode. So that's today's episode. If

(01:54):
you've been like Tracy, why are you talking about the
Blue Ridge Parkway, that one's actually gonna be on Wednesday.
This isn't really a two parter. It's more like two
episodes that have some interconnectedness. So if you're one of
the folks who likes to listen to the two parters together,
I think in this case you don't really need to wait.

(02:14):
Like there are some points where these two stories touch
each other. But this isn't exactly a two part episode.
So we'll start with a little background on the national parks.
The first national park in the United States was created
under the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act, which President Ulysses S.
Grant signed into law in eighteen seventy two. This Act

(02:37):
quote set apart a certain tract of land lying near
the headwaters of the Yellowstone River as a public park.
Under this law, this tract of land was quote hereby
reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale under the
Laws of the United States, and dedicated and set apart

(02:57):
as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit
and enjoyment of the people, and all persons who shall
locate or settle upon, or occupy the same or any
part thereof, except as hereinafter provided, shall be considered trespassers
and removed therefrom This law placed Yellowstone under the control

(03:20):
of the Secretary of the Interior, who was directed to
create rules and regulations to quote provide for the preservation
from injury or spoliation of all timber, mineral deposits, natural curiosities,
or wonders within said park, and their retention in their
natural condition. Any structures built on the designated land were

(03:40):
to be for the accommodation of visitors. Fish and game
were to be protected from quote wanton destruction and from
their capture or destruction. For the purposes of profit. Under
this law, anyone settling on or occupying land in Yellowstone
would be considered a trespasser and removed. This Act was

(04:02):
ostensibly about conserving and preserving Yellowstone and its natural wonders,
but it really didn't make any provisions or exceptions for
the Indigenous peoples who had been living on, using, and
acting as stewards of this land since time immemorial. While
some tribes and nations were still supposed to have fishing

(04:23):
or hunting rights by treaty, later legislation made that explicitly illegal.
In other words, federal policy and the whole mindset around
the National Parks framed Yellowstone as an untouched wilderness rather
than as a place where people had been living, hunting, gathering,
and harvesting for thousands of years. The fish, game and

(04:46):
plants in the park had been a vital source of
food for indigenous peoples, and those protected mineral deposits included
sources of obsidian that Indigenous people had been using to
make tools and projectile points. Yellowstone also holds a deep
spiritual significance for a number of Indigenous nations, and it's
considered sacred. The federal government forcibly removed Indigenous peoples who

(05:10):
had been living on or using the land in Yellowstone,
including the Tukadika, to reservations outside the bounds of the park,
and publicly presented a fiction that Yellowstone had always been
uninhabited and unused. This included a pretty insulting, made up
story about how Indigenous people didn't come to Yellowstone because

(05:31):
they were afraid of the geysers. I do want to
say I love the national parks. I'm glad that we
have them. There are complicated things that I do not
like about their history. We'll talk about that a bit
more in a second. After the creation of Yellowstone, other
national parks followed that included Yosemite National Park in eighteen ninety.

(05:56):
We talked about Yosemite in a two parter that ran
on August eighth and ten tenth of twenty sixteen. And
through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the creation of
these parks generally followed a really similar pattern. They were
formed from federal land under legislation that framed it as
being conserved and protected for the people, but the United

(06:16):
States had obtained this land through warfare, genocide, and exploitive
treaties with the indigenous peoples, and then the government forcibly
removed those people from the land while maintaining this fiction
that the park was protecting something that was pristine and
untouched by humanity. So we can't really cover the entire

(06:37):
history of indigenous people's relationships to these parks in one episode,
but more than a century would pass before the federal
government started to take an approach that was more cooperative
and collaborative than when these parks were established. It's also
not really clear at this point how the Trump administration
will be approaching co stewardship agreements that were signed under

(06:59):
the Biden Yeah, I think a lot of those agreements
were a step in addressing some of the historical wrongs
of these parks. In nineteen sixteen, the National Park Service Act,
also known as the Organic Act, created the National Park Service.
Like the first National Parks, the National Park Service was

(07:19):
established under the Department of the Interior, and the words
of this Act quote, the Service thus established shall promote
and regulate the use of the federal areas known as
National parks, monuments, and reservations, hereinafter specified by such means
and measures as conformed to the fundamental purposes of the

(07:40):
said parks, monuments, and reservations, which purpose is to conserve
the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the
wildlife therein, and to provide for the enjoyment of the
same in such manner and by such means as will
leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations. Most

(08:02):
of the US population lived in the eastern half of
the country, but with the exception of Mackinaw National Park,
which had been on Mackinaw Island in Lake Huron from
eighteen seventy five to eighteen ninety five, there were no
national parks east of the Mississippi River when the National
Park Service was founded. That changed with the creation of

(08:22):
Acadian National Park, originally known as Lafayette National Park in
nineteen nineteen. Acadia is in Maine, so it was closer
to people in the eastern US than the parks in
the west were, but it still really wasn't convenient to
major cities in the east, so Stephen T. Mather, first
Director of the National Park Service, advocated for the creation

(08:45):
of a park that was closer to some of the
major eastern cities. He convinced Secretary of the Interior, Hubert
work to appoint a committee to find a place for
a park, specifically in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, ideally within
an easy drive of Washington, d c. To that end,
the Southern Appalachian National Park Committee was established in nineteen

(09:08):
twenty four. Please don't come at me for how I
said Appalachian. That same year, Congress passed legislation to authorize
and fund the construction and reconstruction of roads, trails, and
bridges in the National Parks, which was becoming more of
a necessity as more people had access to cars. At
this point, the good Roads movement was well under way,

(09:31):
having started in the late nineteenth century after the development
of practical and affordable bicycles. We talked about this more
in our episode on Kitty Knox and the Bike Boom
that came out on January ninth, twenty twenty three. By
the nineteen twenties, the good Roads movement's focus had shifted
more to the needs of cars and motorists rather than
bicycles and cyclists. In nineteen twenty four, when this law

(09:55):
was passed, the US had a population of about one
hundred and fourteen million people, and there were about sixteen
million cars on the road. This was also tied to
the Sea America First Movement. That slogan was coined in
the early twentieth century, encouraging people to travel along these
newly established roads and the railroads, including going to the

(10:18):
national parks to travel and vacation in the United States
rather than going to Europe. After the passage of this
nineteen twenty four legislation, the National Park Service worked out
a memorandum of agreement with the Bureau of Public Roads,
which would later be known as the Federal Highway Administration.
This agreement laid out standards for the survey, construction, and

(10:41):
improvement of roads and trails in the National parks and
national monuments. The Bureau of Public Roads provided engineers and
technical expertise, while the National Park Service provided landscape architects
who focused on designing roadways that had a naturalistic design.
The actual construction was typically done by private firms under

(11:03):
contract to the BPR. So all of this, the roads
and this agreement, and the Sea America First Movement was
part of the creation of Shenandoah National Park and Skyline Drive.
We'll have more on that after a sponsor break in

(11:27):
nineteen twenty four, the Southern Appalachian National Park Committee developed
a questionnaire to solicit public feedback about possible locations for
a national park. The committee traveled all around the Southern
Appalachian Mountains. They mainly looked at sites in North Carolina, Tennessee,
and Virginia, but some of the members also went to

(11:47):
West Virginia, Alabama, and Kentucky. Every state that was under
consideration was interested in this project due to the potential
to bring in tourism dollars and to have federal investments
into the roads and other infrastructure that would be needed
to support the park. So cities and towns all around

(12:08):
hosted all kinds of festivals and what not to try
to attract attention. The committee was looking for sites that
met these criteria quote One mountain scenery with inspiring perspectives
and delightful details. Two areas sufficiently extensive and adaptable so
that annually millions of visitors might enjoy the benefits of

(12:30):
outdoor life and communion with nature without the confusion of overcrowding.
Three a substantial park to contain forests, shrubs, and flowers,
and mountain streams with picturesque cascades and waterfalls overhung with foliage,
all untouched by the hand of man. Four abundant springs

(12:51):
and streams available for camps and fishing. Five opportunities for
protecting and developing the wildlife of the area. The whole
to be a natural museum, preserving outstanding features of the
Southern Appalachians as they appeared in the early pioneer days.
Six accessibility by rail and road. In their report, the

(13:14):
committee wrote that quote, several areas were found that contained
topographic features of great scenic value, where waterfalls, cascades, cliffs,
and mountain peaks with beautiful valleys lying in their midst
gave ample assurance that any or all of these areas
were possible for development into a national park, which would

(13:36):
compare favorably with any of the existing national parks in
the West. All that has saved these nearby regions from
spoliation for so long a time has been their inaccessibility
and the difficulty of profitably exploiting the timber wealth that
mantles the steep mountain slopes. With rapidly increasing shortage and

(13:59):
mountain values of forest products. However, we face the immediate
danger that the last remnants of our primeval forests will
be destroyed. However, remote on steep mountain side or hidden
away in deep, lonely cove, they may be. Ultimately, the
committee recommended the creation of a park in the Blue

(14:20):
Ridge Mountains in Virginia. It noted that this site was
within about a three hour drive of Washington, d c.
And was within about a day's drive of forty million people,
and it described what it thought would be the park's
greatest single feature quote a possible skyline drive along the mountaintop,
following a continuous ridge and looking down westerly on the

(14:42):
Shenandoah Valley, some two thousand five hundred to three thousand
five hundred feet below, and also commanding a view of
the Piedmont Plain stretching easterly to the Washington Monument, which
landmark of our national capital may be seen on a
clear day. Few seen drives in the world could surpass it.

(15:03):
In other words, this recommended park would be a place
where people could hike and fish and camp and picnic
and learn all about plants and wildlife, and get away
from the noise and the pollution of the city. And
it would also be a scenic drive that you could
travel by car. The committee also recommended a second location,
roughly three hundred miles south of the first, in the

(15:25):
Great Smoky Mountains on the border between North Carolina and Tennessee.
The committee thought this site was superior quote because of
the height of mountains, depth of valleys, ruggedness of the area,
and the unexampled variety of trees, shrubs, and plants. But
the Smokies also presented some challenges that the land in

(15:45):
Virginia did not, including that it was very rugged with
higher elevations, which would make road and park development more difficult.
The Smokies also seemed to be prone to excessive rainfall,
something that the committee couldn't really quantify, but that should
be studied more thoroughly. When Secretary of the Interior Hubert

(16:06):
Work passed these recommendations on to the House Committee on
the Public Lands, he said, in part quote, recognizing the
tremendous popularity and value of the National park system in
its service to our people, it is my opinion that
a definite policy should be adopted by the government for
the creation of additional National parks in the Eastern Section

(16:29):
for the public use and general welfare of its millions
of inhabitants. Most of these live in densely populated communities
and cannot afford the time or the money required to
visit the Western national parks. The East contributes its share
to the upkeep and maintenance of the existing national park system,

(16:50):
and for that reason, too should be entitled to recognition.
There were immediate calls for public support for this proposed park.
For example, the committee's report to Secretary Work was printed
in National Parks and Conservation Magazine alongside a notice to
the Women of America by missus John Dickinson Sherman, President

(17:12):
of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. It's said, in
part quote, the General Federation of Women's Clubs is a
service organization. The Women of America constitute the largest body
for service in the world, and there are none more devoted.
I appeal not to General Federation women only, but to
the women of America to support wholeheartedly and enthusiastically the

(17:37):
choice of Secretary Works Committee. Our National Park system is
a service system or it is nothing. I am glad
you read that part, because the last sentence makes me cry.
We've had good fortune in handing off the cry bits
to the other person lately. We sure have so Congress

(17:58):
past legislation authorized the creation of both of the recommended parks,
which President Calvin Coolidge signed into law on May twenty second,
nineteen twenty six. The site in Virginia would become Shenandoah
National Park, and the site in North Carolina and Tennessee
would become Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Three days after that,

(18:19):
Coolidge also signed legislation approving the establishment of Mammoth Cave
National Park. There was a big difference between these three
parks and the ones that had been established in the West. Yellowstone, Yosemite,
and others had been created from land that the federal
government already purportedly owned, So the government was setting aside

(18:41):
land to serve as a park without having to make
arrangements or spend the money to acquire it. But the
land for these three parks was privately owned, mostly by
small individual landowners. It would require a lot of time, money,
and work to buy all of that land and then
transition it into a park. The Southern Apalachian National Park

(19:03):
Committee had referenced this situation in its report, saying, quote,
we have not attempted to estimate the cost of acquiring
this area, as we are not sure that it falls
within the scope of our committee's work. We suggest, however,
that a spirit of constructive cooperation on the part of
the State of Virginia and among some of the large

(19:24):
landowners of this region with whom we have been in
touch promises reasonable prices and perhaps a number of donations.
We suggest that of Congress thinks favorable of this proposed
park site, a commission be appointed to handle the purchase
and to solicit contributions and to arrange condemnation proceedings. If

(19:45):
the State of Virginia deems it wise. The creation of
such a park may well be made contingent on a
limited total land cost. We talked about the process of
acquiring land for Mammoth Cave National Park in our episode
on the Kentucky Cave Wars, which came out on August nineteenth,
twenty twenty four. The creation of the Great Smoky Mountains

(20:08):
National Park is also its own story for Shenandoah National
Park and Skyline Drive. It was a whole process. The
plan was for the Commonwealth of Virginia to purchase the
land and then donate that land to the federal government.
Virginia didn't actually have a budget to buy that land,
though the money would at least in theory, be coming

(20:29):
from donations. So the land that would become Shenandoah National
Park is the ancestral and traditional homeland of multiple indigenous
nations and peoples. This includes speakers of at least three
different language groups, suin, Iroquoian and Algonquian. It's an incredibly

(20:49):
diverse area, but by the time the park was being proposed,
most of the region's indigenous peoples had been forced out
through colonisation, warfare, and removals. This process of displacement and
erasure was still going on into the twentieth century, including
through the passage of a Racial Purity Act in Virginia

(21:13):
in nineteen twenty four that defined indigenous people with any
amount of African ancestry as quote colored. We talk about
this more in our two part episode on Loving versus Virginia,
which was the nineteen sixty seven Supreme Court decision that
found laws banning interracial marriage to be unconstitutional. That two

(21:34):
parter came out on April fifteenth and seventeenth, twenty thirteen.
So by the time Congress authorized the creation of Shenandoah
National Park, most of the people living in these mountains
and valleys were white. They were mainly subsistence farmers who
lived primarily on small tracts of land that had some
planted crops, some pasture for their animals, and some forest

(21:56):
for timber and other resources. There were some people who
had land they were willing to sell, but for the
most part it was land they didn't have some other
kind of use for otherwise. This was often land that
people had been living and working for generations and they
didn't want to leave it. So two overlapping, interconnected projects

(22:19):
started at this point. One was securing the land and
the right of way that would be necessary to build
that quote possible skyline drive along the mountaintop that the
committee had described as the possible greatest single feature of
this National park. That road was intended to travel all
the way from one end of the park to the other,

(22:41):
where it would provide access to campgrounds and picnic areas
and other amenities while also functioning as a scenic road
for sightseeing. The construction of this road would be paid
for largely through federal funding. And then the other project
was to survey and acquire all the land for the
rest of the park, and that was meant to be

(23:03):
funded by private donations. We will talk about that more
after we pause for a sponsor break. When Congress passed
legislation authorizing the establishment of Shenandoah National Park, it described

(23:24):
a five hundred and twenty one thousand acre park, with
that land purchased through donations and private funds not from
the federal budget. An organization called the Shenandoah Valley National
Park Association had already been established before this to try
to raise funds, and it had set an initial goal

(23:45):
of two point five million dollars. By April of nineteen
twenty six, it had raised more than one point two
million dollars in pledges, and that had been enough to
be able to get that congressional authorization for the park.
Once Congress had passed the legislation, Virginia Governor Harry F.
Bird established the Conservation and Development Commission to survey, a praise,

(24:10):
and actually purchase the necessary land. It became clear almost
immediately that the two point five million dollar fundraising goal
was not going to be enough. As we said earlier,
a lot of people didn't want to sell their land,
or they didn't want to sell it as cheaply as
those initial estimates had assumed. Property values also started to

(24:31):
increase because of the proposed park. As five hundred twenty
one thousand acres started to seem impossible, William E. Carson,
chair of the Conservation and Development Commission, advocated for the
size of the park to be reduced. This was the
first in a series of size reductions for the park
in progress, but it was not enough to bridge the

(24:54):
gap between the estimates and the reality. It also didn't
address the fact that the state needed to acquire land
from hundreds of individual landowners, some of who were adamantly
opposed to selling, like sometimes appraiser showed up at somebody's
home and they were greeted with a shotgun. Even in

(25:17):
the best circumstances, this would have been immensely time and
labor intensive, but the circumstances really just seemed to be
getting more and more contentious. So in nineteen twenty eight,
Virginia passed a Blanket Condemnation Act, which allowed the state
to file one condemnation notice in each of the counties

(25:37):
where the park was going to be, and then condemn
all of the applicable land and purchase it by eminent domain.
The thought process behind this law went back to the
aftermath of the Spanish American War, when the US used
a similar tactic to compensate the Vatican for Church owned
land that residents of the Philippines had settled on during

(25:58):
and after the war. Carson's brother had served on the
Supreme Court of the Philippines and was very familiar with
this strategy. Of course, this blanket condemnation led to pushback
and court cases, but it did allow the state to
start acquiring the necessary land a little more quickly. People

(26:20):
were paid for their land, but there were a lot
of disparities in terms of how much they were paid.
Like people who could afford a lawyer or who knew
how to contact to get help, they generally did better
than people who were poor, isolated and didn't have a
lot of access to education or resources. Like if you

(26:40):
had a personal line to your state rep who could
argue with this committee on your behalf, you might get
a lot more money than somebody who really didn't know
where to start with all of this. But then the
Great Depression started in nineteen twenty nine, and that meant
it got a lot harder to bring in new donations
to pay for the condemned Lane and to collect on

(27:01):
people's earlier pledges. By nineteen thirty two, the minimum acreage
needed for the park had been reduced to one hundred
and sixty thousand acres. It ultimately took ten years and
an appropriation of a million dollars from the Virginia General
Assembly to acquire the necessary land. Virginia had not been

(27:22):
paying to or had not been intending to do that,
and was like, if we don't put in this million dollars,
it's not going to happen. As all of this was
going on, the federal government was also building Skyline Drive
as the park's access road and scenic parkway. This started
with the creation of a fishing camp for President Herbert Hoover,

(27:43):
who was the president at the time. William E. Carson
had secured exclusive fishing rights on a part of the
Rapidan River and convinced the President to establish his fishing
camp there. The presidential fishing camp required a road, and
this area was also in the middle of an intense drought,
so this road building became a federal drought relief project.

(28:08):
The Federal Drought Relief Administration paid for out of work
farmers and fruit pickers to build the Road, and then
the road became part of Skyline Drive and the President's
Fishing Camp became part of Shenandoah National Park. This first
phase of work initially connected the Fishing Camp to Big Meadows,
Skyland and Thornton Gap. The idea behind Skyline Drive was

(28:33):
that the road would be easy to drive on, with
gentle spiral curves and a speed limit of thirty five
miles an hour. In most places. Engineers and landscape architects
used techniques that had been refined on roads and parkways
in the parks in the West. It was built in
segments of about ten to twelve miles, with each segment

(28:53):
being built with a different crew, most of them locally hired.
Much of the manual labor was paid for by relief programs,
first drought relief and then relief from the Great Depression.
These segments had their differences based on the needs of
the land along each stretch, but there was also a
sense of unity stemming from the landscape architect's initial work

(29:15):
to plan a road that would simultaneously have the best
views and the least impact on the landscape. So the
road was built along a mountain side or carved out
from the mountain with soil that was then used to
fill in other areas for the road. Blasting was limited
and tightly controlled to minimize any scarring or destruction of

(29:37):
the landscape, and large trees were protected as much as possible.
Retaining walls, tunnels, and bridges were built from local stone,
and originally there were also guard rails made from local
chestnut logs. By the time this road building got underway,
it had been seven years since the Southern Appalachian National
Park Committee had made its recommendation for the establishment of

(30:01):
Shenandoah National Park. While there was plenty of controversy around
the park and the fundraising and the land acquisition, people
were also incredibly impatient for it to be open. An
unpaved portion of the road from Camp Rapidan was open
to the public temporarily in the fall of nineteen thirty two,
and while drivers did seem to enjoy the view, the

(30:23):
temporary opening made it clear how much work there really
was left to do. Not only did the road need
to be paved, but there needed to be overlooks, guardrails,
and other features and amenities added before it could be
really suitable as the scenic drive that it was intended
to be. Herbert Hoover lost the nineteen thirty two presidential election,

(30:45):
and his successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, established the Civilian Conservation
Corps not long after taking office in nineteen thirty three.
This was part of the New Deal, the set of
projects and programs to try to help the United States
get through the Great Depression. The CCC was created through
the Emergency Conservation Work Act, which was legislation passed by

(31:09):
Congress as well as Executive Order sixty one oh one
Relief of unemployment through the performance of useful public work.
The Civilian Conservation Corps provided jobs for unemployed, unmarried young men,
and a lot of that work was related to parks
and natural resources. The CCC was racially segregated, and while

(31:32):
there were CCC camps for black workers elsewhere in Virginia,
the ones at Shenandoah were all white and most of
the people working in them were from small towns in Virginia. Ultimately,
there were twelve CCC camps connected to Shenandoah National Park
and Skyline Drive. CCC workers built hiking trails and fire trails,

(31:53):
picnic areas, campgrounds, and other amenities in the park. They
also planted native trees and shrubs, and built overlooks and
guardrails along Skyline Drive. They graded the land around the road,
helping it to blend in naturally with the landscape, and
they helped restore land that had been overfarmed, again focusing

(32:13):
on native plants and trees. In some areas they cut
down trees and other vegetation to improve the view from
the road and from overlooks, but in others they replanted
areas that had been clearcut or otherwise depleted. There was
a focus on restoration of the native ecosystem, but also
about creating and maintaining of vieute that looked natural, maybe

(32:36):
not wild, and untouched in the way the national parks
in the West had been constructed but scenic and rustic.
Over the course of the Great Depression, about four thousand
people found work in Shenandoah National Park and on Skyline Drive.
The first finished section of Skyline Drive open to the
public in nineteen thirty four. This was the central part

(32:59):
of the parkway. The northern section opened in nineteen thirty six,
and the southern part in nineteen thirty nine, which was
after the park had opened. President Franklin D. Roosevelt formally
dedicated Shenandoah National Park on July third, nineteen thirty six,
at Big Meadows, which is one of the park's recreation areas.

(33:19):
In his address, he said, quote, the creation of this
park is one part of our great program of husbandry,
the joint husbandry of our human resources and our natural resources.
He spoke about the young men who had found work
in building the park and how the park was a
work of natural conservation that would give vacationers a respite

(33:39):
that was good for their souls. He concluded, quote, we
seek to pass on to our children a richer land,
a stronger nation. I therefore dedicate Shenandoah National Park to
this and succeeding generations of Americans for the recreation and
for the recreation which we shall find here. We are
bat thousand on the opposite person reading the thing that

(34:03):
made us cry. Hooray. I mean that was a close
call for me, but I made it okay. So the
park's struggles had not ended with the acquisition of the
necessary land like this address made it sound really lovely,
but there had still been a lot of strife. In
February of nineteen thirty four, National Park Director Arno B.

(34:27):
Cameer had announced that anybody living in the park would
have to leave before the park could open. From the
federal government's point of view, this had always been the expectation,
like that was how it was supposed to work, but
that had not always been communicated very clearly, including to
people who were tenants on land that was being sold

(34:49):
to make the park. They were now being considered squatters.
A resettlement project called the Shenandoah Homesteads Project had been
established in nineteen thirty four and then was taken over
by the Resettlement Administration, which was a new deal anti
poverty program. This program was incredibly controversial, including among some

(35:12):
people who had been supporters of the park since the beginning.
For example, Harry F. Byrd, who had served as Virginia's
governor until nineteen thirty and then had been elected as
a US Senator, found it paternalistic and wasteful. The goal
of this program was to resettle people out of the
park and into newly established communities. People who earned a

(35:35):
living by farming were to be moved to similar homesteads,
and others were expected to find work in other industries.
But some of the people who were displaced by the
creation of the park had been getting at least part
of their income from gathering and selling chestnuts. The chestnut
blight that was introduced to the United States from Asia

(35:57):
reached this part of Virginia as the park was being built.
That dramatically affected the landscape of the park, and it
also destroyed chestnuts as a source of income. So that
meant that some of the people who were being resettled
were not only being displaced, but they also had to
figure out an entirely new way of life. Roughly two

(36:21):
thousand people from four hundred and sixty five families were
forcibly relocated for the creation of Shenandoah National Park, and
most of them did not make it on the homesteads
where they had been resettled, and they were ultimately displaced again.
There were a lot of reasons for this, including that
many of them went from living on land that their
family had owned outright for generations to land where they

(36:45):
had to pay rent or a mortgage. There were also
people who tried to return to their cabins after being
forced out of them, and others who tried to take
shelter in them due to the financial strains of the
Great Depression, The National Park Service eventually destroyed many of
these cabins to try to stop people from squatting in them.

(37:05):
A very small number of elderly people were allowed to
remain in their homes within the park until the end
of their lives or until they needed to move somewhere
that they could have more support. None of this was
really known to park visitors unless they were maybe locals,
and after Sanando A National Park officially opened in nineteen

(37:25):
thirty six, it quickly became one of the most visited
national parks. It was the first national parks who get
a million visitors in a year. Skyline Drive had also
been instantly popular after its first section opened in nineteen
thirty four, and of course, there were black visitors to

(37:46):
the park and black motorists on Skyline Drive right from
the beginning. Perhaps surprisingly considering that this was a southern
state in the nineteen thirties, this doesn't seem like something
that park planners or the federal government had really thought
much about before the park opened. Yeah, if they thought
about it, they didn't like take action to make any

(38:08):
kind of official policy, and by nineteen thirty eight there
were about ten thousand black visitors to Shenandoah National Park
every year, and there were also ongoing issues with black
visitors being given contradictory messages from park staff about where
they were allowed to be, what facilities they were allowed
to use, as well as being hassled by white staff

(38:31):
and visitors. So the National Park Service eventually established segregated
accommodations in the park at Lewis Mountain, including a coffee shop,
picnic area, campground, and cottages. These accommodations opened in nineteen
thirty nine, and soon they became so popular that white
visitors were asking to be admitted to them as well.

(38:53):
Apparently this had some of the best food in the park,
and there was also a musical performance series that was
very popular. The Pinnacle's picnic ground was also established specifically
to be an integrated facility. There was no formal segregation
policy for the rest of the park, but it was
just broadly treated as whites only until the park started

(39:17):
desegregating in the late nineteen forties. It finished that process
in nineteen fifty, although to be clear, there are still
criticisms today about park visitors and staff, and the National
Park Service more broadly being disproportionately white. Today, Skyline Drive
runs for one hundred and five point five miles and

(39:39):
it's the only public road in Shenandoah National Park. In
nineteen ninety six, it was listed on the National Register
of Historic Places. Shenandoah National Park encompasses nearly two hundred
thousand acres of land today when nearly eighty thousand acres
designated as wilderness. There are also more than five hundred
miles of hiking trails, including one hundred and one miles

(40:01):
of the Appalachian Trail, which runs parallel to Skyline Drive.
There is an entry fee of fifteen dollars per person
entering on foot or thirty dollars for private vehicles entering
on Skyline Drive. Motorcycles are twenty five dollars. Shenando A
National Park which I haven't said this earlier because it's

(40:23):
going to be in the behind the scenes, but just
in case people are wondering, it is an indigenous word,
but we're not actually sure from which language are what
specifically it meant. But shenando A National Park is also
connected to Great Smoky Mountains National Park via the Blue
Ridge Parkway, and that's what we're going to talk about
next time. Do you have listener mail? I do I

(40:44):
have listener mail. So this listener mail is from Kieran.
They titled this email Roman Baths and Butts. The email says,
Hello Tracy and Hilly. I hope this email finds you
as well as can possibly be. I just wanted to
write a quick note that I hope might bring you

(41:06):
a little bit of a laugh. Like most people, I've
been having a chaotic year and fell behind on my listening,
but just caught up and had to laugh at the
timing of the Roman bathing traditions mentioned in the unearthed
episodes Tasting History with Max Miller. Also just at a
recent episode on Roman banquets, this time specifically roasted flamingo

(41:28):
and quoted a few wonderfully spicy quips from the poet Marshall,
infamous for his copious writings about whether or not he
was invited to someone's dinner and his perceived quality of
their company. Marshall wrote two slash of one acquaintance quote,
you don't invite anyone to dinner, Katta except your bathing companions.

(41:49):
The baths alone supply you with guests. I've been wondering
why you never invite me, Kada, but now I understand
you don't like the site of my but clearly modern
humans are not the only ones to perhaps have some
misgivings about bathing and dining with all your work colleagues
and acquaintances. Lol. I have not yet read Marshall's copious epigrams,

(42:14):
but this episode made me want to put them on
my reading list. Anyway, Thank you to so much for
all that you do. I cannot express in words how
much I appreciate you both. I want to add my
name to the list of people thanking you, particularly for
the unearthed episodes and especially their introduction. Thank you, thank you,
thank you. I know this year has been a doozy
thus far, to say the least, so I hope that

(42:36):
people in your life bake you cupcakes or something else
nice soon as a treat for all of your hard work.
You deserve all the special treats. Thanks again and all
the best, Kieran. Thank you so much for this email. Kieran.
This was a delight, but I don't really have anything

(42:59):
else at that and I hope that Marshall is how
Marshall's name was pronounced as an ancient Roman person. I
did not go look it up. If it's some other
pronunciation that pronounces letters differently, Sorry, Now I want Tina
Belcher to become obsessed with Roman butts, because you know
she has a butt fetish. If you'd like to send

(43:22):
us a note about this or any other podcast or
history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe
to our show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else
you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts

(43:45):
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