Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio Happy Friday.
I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
This week we.
Talked about Skyline Drive and Shenandoah National Park and the.
Blue Ridge Parkway.
Yeah, all of those things.
So I grew up in northwest North Carolina. I consequently have spent a lot of time on the Parkway in my life. I would say I have probably driven the whole of the North Carolina section some of the Virginia section.
I lived in an.
Area where you could drive approximately north by a couple of different routes and get to the Parkway in Virginia, even though I grew up in North Carolina, and so that was kind of a thing to do. And then at various points I have lived in western North Carolina spent a lot of time on the Parkway. I think I have owned been on Skyline Drive once on a trip to Virginia some years ago.
I think I have.
Only been on a tiny part of the parkway when we were driving to your wedding. Oh really, yeah, I haven't been on either of these.
I'm imagining which way you would have gone that would have taken you onto the parkway, but that's just like my mental mess.
Well, I will say, I don't know if you remember, and I don't even remember if we told you oh no, well it wasn't important, but I didn't want to fret you in any way. As we were driving, I can't remember who it was. As we were driving there or back, we took a weird detour because we were following a dog okay, and we like would lose track of it and try to find it again, and eventually we just
lost track of the dog completely. It must have been on the way home, because I can't imagine I would have been like, especially because we were driving your wedding dress to you, have been like, let's keep following this dog wherever it may lead. Does we got to I mean, I would want to rescue the dog. So I don't remember, but I do remember being in a weird place and being like, uh, oh, we went a long way trying to Oh wow, So I think that was what happened with that.
Yeah, yeah, I think, But.
I remember having a moment of oh, we're on the thing. Not for very long, I mean like for a very short period of time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't remember much of it. I haven't driven to that area very much.
When I was living in the Atlanta area. There was one time that I had gone on a little like vacation, long weekend kind of thing to Ashville, and I just didn't want to go home yet when it was time to go home, and so I made the drive home be just a very long out of their way route where I was on the parkway for a really long time and then dropped off of it and like went through the back roads through northern like North Georgia to get back home, stopped it everywhere that was selling local honey,
got a collection of unusual honeys by the time I got home. I have a great fondness for the Blue Ridge Parkway, and I have also had mixed feelings about it since my childhood, like from going up there with my mom kind of being like, this is a beautiful drive, this is really pretty.
Why is there a road here? Did we build a road here just to drive on? Basically yes, yeah, And I would say that my various layers of mixed feelings about all of these things just got more complex, more layers of mixed feelings because it is beautiful the whole area around the Parkway is beautiful. A lot of it
is currently hurricane devastated, but still beautiful. Something that I've sort of come to appreciate more recently is that I like the idea of everyone having access to nature, and I think that like beautiful mountain views should not be reserved only for people that have the ability to hike long distances, right, that kind of stuff. So I read
a lot of stuff for these episodes. One of the things that I read was the proceedings of a conference that had been held for the fiftieth anniversary of the Parkway.
To be clear, the parkway was.
Not done yet when they had this fiftieth anniversary conference, because it was starting with like when it was authorized, and it took more than fifty years to get done. So there was a paper that was by James F. Shephard called Land Use Attitudes of Rural Residents And here's a quote quote. To obtain the attitudes of rural residents regarding land use, I have conducted ethnographic interviews. All the interviews were tape recorded. Five basic groups of residents were
found in Grayson County. First, the residents were divided into Native or non native categories. I will take a moment to say, I think native or non native in this context is the people who were born and grew up grew up there versus people who moved into the area.
I got youa not suggesting indigenous.
Yeah, I don't think this means indigenous or non indigenous. From these two categories, residents could fall into one of three subcategories one retirees or summer home resident, two counter culturalist, three movers and shakers. And I was like, wow, I had never really thought about what three categories? Could I sort people into? Four areas like the Blue Ridge Mountains around the Parkway, But boy, does that really make.
Sense to me, these three broad categories.
I also read a couple of very deeply frustrating articles about the process of removing people from their land for Shenandoah National Park's establishment, because they made it sound like this was an unprecedented thing in the region, and I'm like, Okay, we're talking about a place that is named Shenandoah, which is generally agreed as coming from an indigenous language, but we're not actually sure which language or which specific word
it's a reference to. Because of all the forced removal and displacement in genocide that had already happened in earlier eras before people were again forcibly removed from Shenandoah for the park.
I found that very frustrating.
Yeah, I fixated on something very silly.
And in this second episode, I'm going to let you tell everybody because he told me, and I was like, I thought it was funny. Oh, it's the same thing that we talked about. I don't know what the se tell me, No, tell me what you fixated on the guy talking about taking a knife to the Mona Lisa. Okay, here's why that was funny to me. Okay, this conversation was happening in the nineteen thirties. If it had happened forty years earlier, no one would have referenced the Mona Lisa.
Oh yeah, because no one knew anything about it until it got stolen in nineteen eleven. That's seat and it just made me laugh so hard. Yeah, because you know, even if you look at old news reports about the theft, some of them feature the wrong piece of art, like nobody wow what the Mona Lisa was? And so, because I really like art history and that theft in particular, is fascinating to me because of how it shaped global
views of art history. It's like, you see, in a very short less than three decades, it had become such an obvious touchstone to people that it was. It had been elevated from completely unknown work to the apex of art that you would never deface. And I'm fascinated by that anyway, mentioned in Themisa, what was the thing that you thought? So?
I thought you were going to say something. So normally when we do these behind the scenes episodes, we recorded the episode and then we recorded the behind the scenes. And since the Skyline Drive episode and the Blue Ridge Parkway episode were sort of researched and written in tandem, we.
Record were We recorded the.
Skyline Drive one, which was finished, and then I finished the Blue Ridge Parkway one and we recorded that the next week, and now here we are recording the behind the scenes for both of them together. But you and I had a conversation after recording the Skyline Drive one about statements that people were making about a proposed skyline through Shenandoah that would be like an unparalleled scenic.
Oh yeah, and you found that hilarious, not that it's not beautiful, but anytime people get real superlative about something like that. I think I said something like, brother, have you not been to Italy? Like when you when you drive along Italy and you could see, you know, the mountains where the Careerra Marble comes from. It's a pretty astonishing view, right, And lots of places have views equally
astonishing and beautiful. So it's like when they're like unparalleled, I'm like, I mean, yes, but like, are you sure you want to go out on a limb like that?
I think some of the people who made statements like that, like there was a context of specifically building a road in order for it to be a scenic drive without a lot of other purpose, And I was trying to figure out if there were other Like, there are definitely other There are plenty of other parkways in the world. There are a ton of other parkways in the United States.
The Blue Ridge Parkway and Skyline Drive were built during an era of road building through and to connect to the National Parks, and a lot of it had this like very similar quote naturalistic design for the road and like the road was supposed to be beautiful and the landscape the road was traveling through was supposed to be
beautiful and managed. Yeah, So some of the people at the time who were riding about this kind of thing made it sound like this was a completely new idea for the entire world, that nowhere in the world had anyone decided to just make a road in order to be a scenic road, not just to have a road that's a highway for travel that happens to be scenic.
And I don't actually know the answer to that whether this really I would say probably not a completely unprecedented thing, but some of the people who were writing about these roads in the nineteen thirties made it sound like it was.
Totally new idea.
No one had ever thought to just build a scenic road for its scenicness as the primary purpose before.
I also get in that like heady overthinking space of building a scenic road for it to be scenic, but also having to do maintenance on it. I'm like, is that really scenic or is it curated? It's definitely curated, right, So, like I don't know, Like I said, it gets way too in my head and in the weeds about like what is that?
Then?
What's a real scenic road? Is it very paved? Is it?
Yeah?
Because you'll never see the truly untouched version of it. Yeah, unless you are a person this this goes back to your discussion about how important it is that you know, nature access be available to everyone, And clearly everyone could not see those places if we did not put some sort of roadway through there.
Right.
Yeah, just I end up in the I'm the snake that bites its own tail. I can't kick it out of the spiral.
All of these things are true, they are all interconnected together. I said at the I think, I think I said in the Shenandoah episode that a lot of people that I talked to in and around the Nashville area were incredibly anxious for tourism to come back to pre Helene levels. I don't want to like minimize the fact that the
like this storm was horrifically destructive. There were a lot of whole towns and villages that were basically wiped off the map, Like the entire the entire village just basically swept off of its foundations by floodwaters and the debris and the floodwaters. There are a lot of roads in the area that are closed to everything but local traffic, and in some cases, like you actually have to have a permit saying yes, this is like I live here
to be able to go down that road. So I intentionally did not try to get into any of those areas. I intentionally stayed like in the areas that have said we are open for business, please come.
And I don't know, I.
Have nothing else to say about that, really except that, like, if you've been wondering, is it okay to go to vacations on these places, the answer seems to be from the local people, Yes, it's okay to go on vacation to these places, but like, don't go try to bully yourself into the areas that are still like lacking basic services, like where the roads are still destroyed, that kind of stuff.
Yeah, and I'm very glad you did these episodes, because all of this does speak to the fact that the news cycle is so bananas that we can lose track of the things that take a long time to recover from. Yeah, Like, there's no coverage of Helene recovery going on right in any major news outlets that I've seen in quite some time. And it's easy, I think, for people that are not immediately affected by it to forget that there are still people really really struggling to try to get their feet
back unto them. I don't know how we fix this problem because there is so much to take in constantly. But also if you think I did not run to the Xerxes Society for Invertebrate Conservation, you're wrong.
So excited, I.
Have already been working a lot on my selection of plants for the yard this year to make sure that you know we're friendly to pollinators and other creatures. But they're full of good information there. If anybody doesn't hasn't been there yet and hadn't heard of it until our listener mail this week that mentioned it specifically because it's cool. Yeah, yeah, I got a flashback as you were reading that Listener letter to the time I had a very sad breakdown
on a plane over a bee. It's just not that long ago. There was a bee in a plane during boarding. This is probably a year a year and a half ago, and the people sitting near me lost their minds and freaked out and had were like kill it, and I was trying to like I wanted to collect it and put it outside again. During boarding boarding door not closed and going, and there was one woman that was just
like people are allergic. You could die, and I'm like, are you allergic, and like it's a bee, it's fine, and I just I literally ended up in tears because I was the only person that cared about the bee. Oh and it did not make it off of that plane. I'm sad to say, because some dude had to show what a protector he was. Anyway, Sorry, be it did not do enough for you that day, anyway, What you can't for your pollinators? We need them. Yeah, without them, we're not gonna eat. Huh.
Yeah, yeah. I don't know.
If I have anything else to say about any of these things, I will reiterate that I do love our national parks. I do not love the fact that, especially in the West, like.
The national parks.
Exist because of displacement and genocide. And then in the East also true, but like separated by more time that
had passed in the interim. Under the Biden administration, we had an Indigenous Secretary of the Interior for the first time, an Indigenous Director of the National Park Service for the first time, and a lot of work was being done to try to work out co management agreements with different indigenous nations to co manage land that is their ancestral homeland in some cases, to return land from the parks.
That didn't start with the Biden administration, but like that had been like specific intentional thing that had been undertaken under that administration. And I don't know what the status of any of that is at this point, in part because the fire hose of things about the national parks in particular has been focused on other stuff like reductions in force for the park workers and like opening up national forests two more logging and that kind of stuff.
So my efforts to figure out, like what the Trump administration's views are on that part, I did not go read Project twenty twenty five or whatever to find out if that said anything. But yeah, I hope, hope even the right word that we don't make a bunch of big step backwards and all of that.
Me too, fingers toes a little bee feet crossed, Yeah, little bfeet.
If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcasts or history podcasts that I heart radio dot com, we will be back tomorrow with a Saturday classic something brand new on Monday. Whatever's happening on your weekends. I hope it is as lovely as possible. If you're able to get out into some nature, if that's accessible to you, I hope you're able to do that. That always helps me take a little bit deeper breath than I can take when I am just in my
house all the time. So we'll be back with a Saturday classic tomorrow. Is something brand new on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.