Shenandoah National Park
Shenandoah National Park is a national park of the United States that encompasses part of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. The park is long and narrow, with the Shenandoah River and its broad valley to the west, and the rolling hills of the Virginia Piedmont to the east. Skyline Drive is the main park road, generally traversing along the ridgeline of the mountains. Almost 40% of the park's land——has been designated as wilderness areas and is protected as part of the National Wilderness Preservation System. The highest peak is Hawksbill Mountain at.
Park purpose
As stated in the foundation document:Geography
The park encompasses parts of eight counties. On the west side of Skyline Drive they are, from northeast to southwest, Warren, Page, Rockingham, and Augusta counties. On the east side of Skyline Drive they are Rappahannock, Madison, Greene, and Albemarle counties. The park stretches for along Skyline Drive from near the town of Front Royal in the northeast to near the city of Waynesboro in the southwest. The park headquarters are located in Luray.Geology
Shenandoah National Park lies along the Blue Ridge Mountains in north-central Virginia. These mountains form a distinct highland rising to elevations above. Local topographic relief between the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley exceeds at some locations. The crest of the range divides the Shenandoah River drainage basin, part of the Potomac River drainage, on the west side, from the James and Rappahannock River drainage basins on the east side.Some of the rocks exposed in the park date to over one billion years in age, making them among the oldest in Virginia. Bedrock in the park includes Grenville-age granitic basement rocks and a cover sequence of metamorphosed Neoproterozoic sedimentary and volcanic rocks of the Swift Run and Catoctin formations. Columns of Catoctin Formation metamorphosed basalt can be seen at Compton Peak. Clastic rocks of the Chilhowee Group are of early Cambrian age. Quaternary surficial deposits are common and cover much of the bedrock throughout the park.
The park is located along the western part of the Blue Ridge anticlinorium, a regional-scale Paleozoic structure at the eastern margin of the Appalachian fold and thrust belt. Rocks within the park were folded, faulted, distorted, and metamorphosed during the late Paleozoic Alleghanian orogeny. The rugged topography of Blue Ridge Mountains is a result of differential erosion during the Cenozoic, although some post-Paleozoic tectonic activity occurred in the region.
History
Creation of the park
Legislation to create a national park in the Appalachian mountains was first introduced by freshman Virginia congressman Henry D. Flood in 1901, but despite the support of President Theodore Roosevelt, failed to pass. The first national park was Yellowstone, in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. It was signed into law in 1872. Yosemite National Park was created in 1890. When Congress created the National Park Service in 1916, additional parks had maintained the western pattern. Grand Canyon, Zion and Acadia were all created in 1919 during the administration of Virginia-born president Woodrow Wilson. Acadia finally broke the western mold, becoming the first eastern national park. It was also based on donations from wealthy private landowners. Stephen Mather, the first NPS director, saw a need for a national park in the southern states, and solicited proposals in his 1923 year-end report. In May 1926, Congress and President Calvin Coolidge authorized the NPS to acquire a minimum of and a maximum of to form Shenandoah National Park, and also authorized creation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. However, the legislation also required that no federal funds would be used to acquire the land. Thus, Virginia needed to raise private funds, and could also authorize state funds and use its eminent domain power to acquire the land to create Shenandoah National Park.Virginia's Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Harry F. Byrd supported the creation of Shenandoah National Park, as did his friend William E. Carson, a businessman who had become Virginia's first chairman of the Commission on Conservation and Development. Development of the western national parks had assisted tourism, which produced jobs, which Byrd and local politicians supported. The land that became Shenandoah park was scenic, mountainous, and had also lost about half of its trees to the Chestnut blight. However, it had been held as private property for over a century, so many farms and orchards existed. After Byrd became governor and convinced the legislature to appropriate $1 million for land acquisition and other work, Carson and his teams tried to figure out who owned the land. They found that it consisted of more than 5,000 parcels, some of them inhabited by tenant farmers or squatters. Some landowners, including wealthy resort owner George Freeman Pollock and Luray Realtor and developer L. Ferdinand Zerkel, had long wanted the park created and had formed the Northern Virginia Park Association to win over the national park selection committee. However, many local families who had lived in the area for generations did not want to sell their land, and some refused to sell at any price. Carson promised that if they sold to the commonwealth, they could still live on their homesteads for the rest of their lives. Carson also lobbied the new president, Herbert Hoover, who bought land to establish a vacation fishing camp near the headwaters of the Rapidan River.
The commonwealth of Virginia slowly acquired the land through eminent domain, eventually giving it to the U.S. federal government to establish the national park. Carson's brother suggested that Virginia's legislature authorize condemnation by counties rather than condemn each parcel. Some families accepted the payments because they needed the money and wanted to escape the subsistence lifestyle. Nearly 90 percent of the inhabitants worked the land for a living: selling timber, charcoal, or crops. They had previously been able to earn money to buy supplies by harvesting the now-rare chestnuts, by working during the apple and peach harvest season, or by selling handmade textiles and crafts and moonshine.
However, Carson and the politicians did not seek citizen input early in the process, nor convince residents that they could live better in a tourist economy. Instead, they started with an advertising campaign to raise the funds, and courthouse property evaluations and surveys. Upon Mather's death in 1929, the new NPS director, Horace M. Albright also decided that the federal agency would only accept vacant land, so even elderly residents would be forced to leave. Thus, many families and entire communities were forced to vacate portions of the Blue Ridge Mountains in eight Virginia counties. Although the Skyline Drive right-of-way was purchased from owners without condemnation, the costs of the acreage purchased trebled over initial estimates and the acreage decreased to what Carson called a "fish-bone" shape and others a "shoestring". Although Byrd and Carson convinced Congress to reduce the minimum size of Shenandoah Park to just over to eliminate some high-priced lands, in 1933 newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to also create the Blue Ridge Parkway to connect to then-under-construction Skyline Drive on the Shenandoah National Park ridgeline, which required additional condemnations.
When many families continued to refuse to sell their land in 1932 and 1933, proponents changed tactics. Freeman hired social worker Miriam Sizer to teach at a summer school he had set up near one of his workers' communities and asked her to write a report about the conditions in which they lived. Although later discredited, the report depicted the local population as very poor and inbred and was soon used to support forcible evictions and burning of former cabins so residents would not sneak back. University of Chicago sociologists Fay-Cooper Cole and Mandel Sherman described how the small valley communities or hollows had existed "without contact with law or government" for centuries, which some analogized to a popular comic strip Li'l Abner and his fictional community, Dogpatch. In 1933, Sherman and journalist Thomas Henry published Hollow Folk drawing pitying eyes to local conditions and "hillbillies." As in many rural areas of the time, most remote homesteads in the Shenandoah lacked electricity and often running water, as well as access to schools and health facilities during many months. However, Hoover had hired experienced rural teacher Christine Vest to teach near his summer home.
Carson had had ambitions to become governor in 1929 and 1933, but Byrd instead selected George C. Peery of Virginia's southwestern region to succeed easterner Pollard. After winning the election, Peery and Carson's successor would establish Virginia's state park system, although plans to relocate reluctant residents kept changing and basically failed. Carson had hoped to head that new state agency but was not selected because of his growing differences with Byrd, over fees owed his brother and especially over the evictions that began in late 1933 against his advice but pursuant to new federal policies and that garnered much negative publicity.
Most of the reluctant families came from the park's central counties, not the northern counties nearest Byrd's and Carson's bases, or from the southern end where residents could see tourism's benefits at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello since the 1920s, as well as the jobs available in the Shenandoah and new Blue Ridge projects. In 1931 and 1932, residents were allowed to petition the state agency to stay another year to gather crops, etc. However, some refused to cooperate to any extent, others wanted to continue to use resources now protected, and many found the permit process arbitrary. Businessman Robert H. Via filed suit against the condemnations in 1934 but did not prevail.
Carson announced his resignation from his unpaid job effective in December 1934. As one of his final acts, Carson wrote the new NPS director, Arno B. Cammerer, urging that 60 people over 60 years of age whose plots were not visible from the new Skyline Drive not be evicted. When evictions kept creating negative publicity in 1935, photographer Arthur Rothstein coordinated with the Hollow Folk authors and then went to document the conditions they claimed.
The creation of the park had immediate benefits to some Virginians. During the Great Depression, many young men received training and jobs through the Civilian Conservation Corps. The first CCC camp in Virginia was established in the George Washington National Forest near Luray, and Governor Pollard quickly filled his initial quota of 5,000 workers. About 1,000 men and boys worked on Skyline Drive, and about 100,000 worked in Virginia during the agency's existence. In Shenandoah Park, CCC crews removed many of the dead chestnut trees whose skeletons marred views in the new park, as well as constructed trails and facilities. Tourism revenues also skyrocketed. On the other hand, CCC crews were assigned to burn and destroy some cabins in the park, to prevent residents from coming back. Also, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes who had jurisdiction over the NPS and partial jurisdiction over the CCC, tried to use his authority to force Byrd to cooperate on other New Deal projects.
Shenandoah National Park was finally established on December 26, 1935, and soon construction began on the Blue Ridge Parkway that Byrd wanted. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt formally opened Shenandoah National Park on July 3, 1936. Eventually, about 40 people were allowed to live out their lives on land that became the park. One of them was George Freeman Pollock, whose residence Killahevlin was later listed on the National Register, and whose Skyland Resort reopened under a concessionaire in 1937. Carson also donated significant land; a mountain in the park is now named in his honor and signs acknowledge his contributions. The last grandmother resident was Annie Lee Bradley Shenk. NPS employees had watched and cared for her since 1950; she died in 1979 at age 92. Most others left quietly. 85-year-old Hezekiah Lam explained, "I ain't so crazy about leavin' these hills but I never believed in bein' ag'in the Government. I signed everythin' they asked me."