Posted on 02/16/2010 6:45:28 AM PST by jay1949
The establishment of the Shenandoah National Park displaced the traditional communities of Backcountry folk who had lived for generations in the Blue Ridge Mountains between Front Royal and Rockfish Gap. By and large, the houses, barns, and stores which were within the Park boundaries were not spared -- they were razed. [Vintage photographs]
(Excerpt) Read more at backcountrynotes.com ...
Thanks for posting. That is where my family are from. Beautiful country!
Maybe on a smaller scale, but not to far from Bedford Village, a similar event took place. Now called Raystown Lake.
The process of moving buildings and creating something from them is alien to the government mind. What you are suggesting ParcMan do is what could be termed “’husbanding’ the resource”, in this case, a cultural resource.
Government does not do “husbandry” of anything at all well.
Aldo Leopold said it best, “Husbandry of somebody else’s land is a contradiction in terms.”
The Founders knew this. That is why they forbid government from owning most of the land which the Federal government now owns.
Those cabins would still be standing and would be well cared for were they still in private hands.
For the animal lovers, there would be far more animals were those small farms still function. Farms provide edge, a variety of foods, and have been a magnet for wild animals since the first cave man planted the first few plants for a garden.
Sell off Federal lands, let private farms spread. The animal population will rise as the farms spread. Should any doubt this, check the deer population of Long Island.
PS Long Island also has a thriving black bear population.
These terrible and destructive agencies came into being when nobody was looking. Our representatives didn’t care. they shafted us on things like this -— they silently sided with the bureacrats.
I just get so angry.
The same thing happened in the Ozarks. The Eleven-point river was declared a ‘wild river’ or something like that, under one of the big land agencies like the BLM -— and they threw out all the farmers in the river valley.
Perfectly good productive arable land and perfectly good productive farmers, whole communities -— now it is empty, depopulated, so a few kayakers can go shooting down the river and not have to look at the indigenes.
What is it about THIS article that interests you? (i.e., Virginia; colonial Virginia, colonial America; log cabins, etc????)
Actually here in Louisiana where I've been for the past 10 years or so, there's an analogous little project called Vermilionville
It’s usually called “ethnic cleansing”, and classified as a “crime against humanity”.
Leave the troll alone, and he'll slink back under his bridge, eventually.
BTW, interesting article.
“Deliverance” was a bunch of propaganda crap. I would rather live among the southern mountain people than any big city people in the northeast.
I am an American, and we still have freedom of speech, and when that freedom is ABUSED, as was done earlier in this thread, I will call the individual upon it.
His nasty postings do NOT belong in a messagethread about Colonial Virginia. NO way. I wonder why he's still on FR, if all he's been doing is trolling all morning????
"wow, them thar is my Roots!!"
I’ll always remember Michael Medved’s autobiography.
In his college days in the sixties he regularly spent time off hitchhiking his way across the country. He said he found the best hospitality in the South, a gawky Jewish college boy.
He wrote about being offended at the portrayals of the South in movies like “Deliverance” and “Easy Rider” as they did not resemble what he had experienced.
the first 3...:)
The book chronicled my Dad’s side from cover to cover with him being a direct descendent of Robert the Bruce, and my GGGG grandparent who served as a Wagoner with General Braddock and survived General Braddock’s defeat. Later moving to Virginia and then on to the western parts of North Carolina where he and at least one son fought the British loyalist at Kings Mountain. The rest of the story is classic Grapes of Wrath. The poverty in the south which began long before the 1929 market crash drove the family west to California around 1924.
The puzzling part is why the writer, James Web remains a Democrat. It seems he understands the roots of Conservatism and the conflict Conservatives have with Progressive Socialist – but yet he does not follow the same path as many other southern democrats and abandon his old party. Even my family were once Democrats until Reagan.
Jay1949 thanks for posting, these are my people. Don’t know what the admin pulled, hennie pennie, but if it had anything to do with Deliverance, then it referenced a drunk ***hole Univ. of S.Carolina professor, Dickey, who wrote it, and played to all of the “yankee” self righteousness and superior intellectual bigotry of academia, by characterizing Appalachians as inbred perverts. The reality is that as NavyCanDo has pointed out from Webb’s book on the “Scots-Irish” (correction, not Scotch)—self sufficiency has always been the key. I’ll take sorghum over Dixie Crystals and corn liquor over Beam anyday! Thanks for your comments NavyCanDo-there wouldn’t be a United States without the Scots-Irish. My people fought the Brits in French/Indian war, and then again in the Revolution. Later, they fought the yankee industrialist descendants of new world tories-to no avail. I too, cannot understand how Webb remains a Democrat.. guess that could change. Thank you all, this made my day and is helping me write today.
I've been meaning to take a looksee at that book, to see if there was coverage of that battle. Have you seen the History Channel documentary about it? I've watched it several times, it's an older program, frequently on repeat.
So many millions of Americans descend from people who fought there, and they don't even know it..... do they, "Cousin"??
LOL -- just joking. NOT serious. LOL
There is a variety of reasons — in addition to politics — for the destruction of the original structures within the SNP boundaries. There are instances where the Park Service has done a very good job at cultural preservation — Cades Cove in Tennessee comes to mind; virtually all of the original buildings were preserved and are still there.
One factor was the chestnut blight, which went from north to south, reaching the SNP area much earlier than Tennessee. Also, the Blue Ridge folk had known that the Park was coming for a decade. Many of the structures had either been abandoned or were suffering from lack of maintenance, making preservation harder.
Another factor was local support — Virginia has always had a “Virginia Cavalier” orientation and the state government has not taken a strong interest in preserving west-of-the-Piedmont culture. Ditto, local governments in the Piedmont near the SNP. Tennessee, by contrast, has a fine collection of log buildings preserved by private and local government interests, and there was local pressure on the Federals to preserve the Great Smokies log structures. In Virginia, most log cabins and timber structures which have been preserved are either in private hands or owned by local museums, such as Crab Orchard in Tazewell and Frontier Culture in Staunton, within the old Backcountry itself.
In my experience, field-level employees of the Park Service and the Forest Service (and similar state agencies as well) are mostly conscientious about both resource conservation and cultural preservation. However, the agencies are not run by the rank-and-file, but by political appointees and patronees, who often have a very different agenda. It is hard to buy votes with tax money by moving and restoring a delapidated cabin — better to raze the cabin in order to build a road, so that the politicos can show up for the ribbon-cutting and hand out a big check (and the contractors can contribute to the next campaign).
In Virginia, it seems that the state and local interests viewed the Blue Ridge folk as hillbillies and kissing-cousins of the traitorous West Virginians; in Tennessee, which is pure Backcountry, the local attitudes were very different. Consequently, out of some 500 or so structures originally within the SNP boundaries, only four survived, less than one per cent; in Cades Cove, the survival rate was near 100 per cent, and elsewhere in the Great Smokies somewhere around one-third to one-half of the original structures were preserved.
I am so happy for you.
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