Thanks for sharing... great photos... I love the Blue Ridge and live at the northern end of the Shenadoah Valley. This is beautiful country.
Good post, thanks! Very interesting - I’ve always enjoyed the Blue Ridge Park but have been largely ignorant of the history behind it.
I love this website. Thanks for posting.
ParcMan does the same thing everywhere.
In hte everglades, ParcMan destroyed every building along the Tamiami Trail (US 41) which they were able to condemn. That neant all except a few Indian groups of a few thatched huts and the occasional trailer.
After destroying everything, the bachelor’s children in uniform created the Tamiami Trail Committee, or some such example of “BureauSpeak”.
Once all the historic structures were destroyed, then ParcMan funded a committee to deal with the very structures ParcMan destroyed.
Your tax money, being wasted by ParcPersons - why?
Because they can.
That's a shame. Too bad they couldn't have done something like Old Bedford Village, in PA. Rather than raze colonial era homes, shops, mills, etc. from around the state, they painstakingly disassembled them and put them back together in a colonial community.
I remember the 1990’s Washington City Paper article on the “Highland Clearances” of the Shenandoah area during the park’s establishment in the thirties. It was pretty well-researched and quite sympathetic to those who were run out. I had not known that they had been devastated by the chestnut blight. I had known that the American Chestnut was a staff of life to the Eastern Woodlands and was probably the most important extinction in the east—Passenger Pigeon, Eastern Woods Bison and Carolina Parakeet notwithstanding.
*ping* Colonial Virginia
Not TN, but might interest you.
If all else fails, I will retreat up the valley of Virginia, plant my flag on the Blue Ridge, rally around the Scotch-Irish of that region, and make my last stand for liberty amongst a people who will never submit to British tyranny whilst there is a man left to draw a trigger.
George Washington, at Valley Forge.
Quoted from the book, Born Fighting - How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. ( A great book by the way)
Thanks for posting. That is where my family are from. Beautiful country!
"wow, them thar is my Roots!!"
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.
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.
one-time ping list invite for those interested this article, Lost Cabins of the Virginia Blue Ridge.
I have posted a followup, Backcountry Folk of the Virginia Blue Ridge, and I have several more of these articles in process — one on the Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains, two on the Tennessee Smokies, one on the North Carolina Smokies, one on East Kentucky, and there are more formulating in the gray matter — anyone who would like to be on a “ping list” please let me know and I will put one together.
Publication schedule is irregular, but these should be done in the next four to six weeks. The theme is more or less old log buildings and the people who built and lived in them, along with a sidebar now and then on topics like the Blue Ridge Railroad, also in process.