Blue Ridge Parkway

When I saw that display, I thought, Hey, maybe we should do an episode on the Blue Ridge Parkway, and then some very cursory research turned that into it should have an introduction on Skyline Drive and then the rest of the episode will be on the Blue Ridge Parkway. And then during the note taking, Skyline Drive grew into its whole episode by itself, which came out on Monday. I think we said last time, this isn't really a

two parter. There are some connections between the Blue Ridge Parkway and Skyline Drive, including that they are physically connected at Rockfish Gap in Virginia. The Blue Ridge Parkway is four hundred and sixty nine miles long, making it the longest linear park in the United States and the longest

roadway that was planned as a single unit. Like Skyline Drive, its creation was deeply connected to the federal government's efforts to provide relief from the Great Depression and to conserve the landscape and the views of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

twenty six. But there was actually a similar road planned through the Blue Ridge Mountains before that, a scenic toll road that would run from Marion, Virginia to Tallula, Georgia.

A very short stretch of today's Blue Ridge Parkway follows Pratt's proposed route. It is just a couple of miles in North Carolina, a little bit south of Linville Falls.

of maps for the roads that did exist. This became a bigger need as cars became more popular, more affordable, and more available. That point, sort of, the popularity of cars had outpaced the establishment of improved roads to handle them. While the National Park to Park Highway existed, it was

pretty rugged. Most of it was not even paved. One group of people departed Denver, Colorado, on August twenty sixth, nineteen twenty, the day after the highway was dedicated, to travel the whole route, and they stopped for lunches, dinners, and speaking engagements, and then they spent the night somewhere every night and this little road trip took them seventy

six days. So the idea of an Eastern National Park to Park Highway got some support, including from the National Park Service and the Bureau of Public Roads, which later became the Federal Highway Administration. The idea for the Eastern Highway was that it would build on established roads and highways. It would improve ones that already existed and create new

ones where they did not exist. This proposed park to Park Highway would travel through beautiful parts of the country, but it was also meant to be a regular highway open for recreation and for commercial traffic.

related to natural resources. During that visit, Senator Harry Bird of Virginia suggested that a new road could be built through the Blue Ridge Mountains, similar to Skyline Drive that was in the process of being built through Shenandoah National Park, and that road would connect Shenandoah to Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Title iiO of the Act was focused on public works and construction projects, and it's set in part quote not less than fifty million dollars of the amount made available by this Act shall be allotted for a National Forest Highways B National forest roads, trails, bridges, and related projects. C National park roads and trails in national parks approved or authorized. That fifty million dollars was part of a

three point three billion dollar federal public Works program. On November twenty fourth, nineteen thirty three, Secretary of the Interior Herald Ikis, approved the construction of a parkway connecting Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains National Parks as a public works project. The following month, four million dollars was allotted for the construction.

The Federal Highway Act of nineteen thirty four also included language about increasing employment by allocating money for road construction, including quote survey, construction, reconstruction, and maintenance of highways, roads, trails, bridges, and related projects in national parks and monuments and national forests.

The next step was to plan a route. The easier part was the northern end in Virginia since the road was supposed to connect to Skyline Drive in Shenandoa National Park, but since Great Smoky Mountains National Park is on the border between North Carolina and Tennessee, the southern end of the road could approach it through either of those states.

Although there were plenty of critics of this project, overall, both states were extremely eager to be home to the southern end of the parkway, since the construction would bring jobs to the area and the finished parkway would be a source of tourism dollars. This region had been economically depressed even before the star of the Great Depression, and the Depression had made that situation much worse, so there was a huge need for relief whichever way the parkway went.

elevations that the parkway would pass through. So advocates for the North Carolina route suggested that people would appreciate those cooler, higher elevations during the hot summers rather than having to come down out of the mountains and drive through humid valleys along the river. One of the supporters of the North Carolina route was our Getty Browning. That's an engineer who had scoped out the proposed route himself on foot.

Landscape architect Stanley William Abbott favored the Virginia route. Both of these men were very deeply involved with the creation of the parkway. Secretary Ikis appointed a committee chaired by Maryland Senator George Radcliffe, and the first hearings were held on February sixth, nineteen thirty four. The Radcliffe Committee recommended the Tennessee route, but rather than going with that recommendation, Itus approved only the portion that was the same for

both of the plans. This led to another round of extensive lobbying by both sides and a second set of hearings. The North Carolina route was finally approved on November tenth, nineteen thirty four. One of the arguments for going with the North Carolina route was that Tennessee was already getting federal relief and support through the Tennessee Valley Authority, which

had been established the year before. A decade after all of this, Tennessee also got approval for its own parkway, the Foothills Parkway, alongside Great Smoky Mountains National Park, although today, more than eighty years later, only part of that parkway is complete and opened to the public.

June thirtieth, nineteen thirty six. By that point, the construction had been going on for about a year. Long before that, even before the route was approved, the parkway was being described not just as a road, but as an elongated park with a much wider right of way than a typical road. The right of way is the land that a road rests on or is planned to be built on, along with the land on either side that is owned

and maintained by a government entity. Exactly how much land is needed depends on the type of road, like According to the US Department of Transportation. A four lane divided highway today needs a right of way of one hundred fifty to three hundred feet as about forty five to ninety one meters or more. In the nineteen thirties, the right of way for a two lane road was often more like fifty to seventy five feet or fifteen to

twenty two meters. But the plans for this parkway started out with a plan of a very ambitious one thousand feet or more than three hundred meters, to allow for more control of the area around the road and its landscape. That thousand foot right of way turned out to be enormously impractical and really expensive, so in practice, as the governments of North Carolina and Virginia got to work acquiring all this land, they settled on rights of way as narrow as two hundred feet in some places but more

like eight hundred feet in others. Scenic easements were also obtained from property owners adjacent to the parkway. These easements barred quote unsightly or offensive material such as sawdust, ashes, trash, or junk, as well as things like billboards and other commercial signs in sight of the parkway. Sometimes land that the government acquired was also leased back to the land owners, provided that they could follow those standards for keeping things scenic.

Just like with Shenandoah National Park, the process for obtaining the land was handled by the states, with the land then being transferred to the federal government. We talked about Virginia's process on Monday. It had passed a blanket condemnation law that allowed for one condemnation notice to cover an entire county, and then the Commonwealth could buy those condemned properties under eminent domain. Virginia would transfer the land to the federal government once a price had been agreed upon

to compensate the landowner. In North Carolina, a map of the affected properties was posted at each county courthouse, and as soon as that map was posted, the property was considered to belong to the state. The state could immediately transfer it to the federal government and then negotiate a

price with the landowner afterward. People typically already knew that this was coming before the maps were posted, and they were also generally allowed to keep living on in using their lands temporarily while the negotiations were going on to settle on a price. In both states, this was a confusing and frustrating process full of inconsistencies and contradictory information,

and people who were furious about being forced off their land. Understandably, there were so many issues tracing back to people being allowed to stay temporarily in North Carolina that in nineteen thirty seven, the National Park Service recommended that no more land be transferred until the people living on it had

been evicted. Virginia's policy of agreeing on a price before transferring the land meant that it took a lot longer to get the land of the federal government, but in North Carolina, actually getting compensation for land that had already been transferred became truly arduous. This could also have a huge impact on people who were losing only a small part of their land. Like if the parkway route cut through the middle of somebody's farm, it wasn't just that

now there would be a road through the farm. It would be a road that the farmer could not connect a driveway to or use for commercial purposes. They might not even be able to cross that road easily.

small individual landowners. According to federal data, most of the small farms in the region were earning only about eighty six dollars per year, so part of the thought process was that these families would ultimately be a lot better off thanks to the tourism that the parkway would bring in, But that didn't really make it easier for people who didn't want to lose their homes and farms, especially since many of them had been on that land for generations.

Generally speaking, people who had more money and resources and political connections were able to get more money for their land, and in some cases get it.

Clarkson argued that the parkway was going to wreck Little Switzerland, and he filed suit after the States seized some of his land. This case made its way to the state

Supreme Court, where Clarkson had to recuse himself. That left the court split three to three, effectively upholding an earlier decision, which meant that Clarkson got twenty five thousand dollars for his land, plus the parkway's narrowest right of way through Little Switzerland, plus multiple entrances to the parkway for the resort. By the time things were settled, the dispute had gone

on for three years. The parkway did turn out to be an economic boon for Little Switzerland, but Clarkson died in nineteen forty two without seeing that.

North Carolina, and that land was open to tourists. Once the work on the parkway actually got started, though, the government started looking at a higher elevation route around Grandfather Mountain instead. Eventually, Morton's grandfather died and then After World

War II, Morton took control of the family business. He developed that property into a much bigger tourist attraction, with a road up to the top of Grandfather Mountain and a mile high swinging bridge which if you grew up in North Carolina during a certain era you surely saw ads for. This was a suspension bridge that went across an eighty foot chasm on the property.

growing tourist attraction. He had the support of various high ranking political figures, including a series of North Carolina governors and other wealthy people, so this dispute went on for more than forty years. Ultimately, Morton and the National Park Service did reach an agreement involving a middle route between the lower and higher elevation routes, but this stretch of the Parkway was the last to be built, and it

didn't happen until the nineteen eighties. We're going to come back to that in just a bit.

southern Appalachian Mountains. Many of the Cherokee had been forced out of this territory in the nineteenth century, including during the massive removal that became known as the Trail of Tears. We talked about this more in our Georgia gold Rush episode, which came out on August twenty seventh of twenty eighteen.

Kuala boundary, which is often described as a reservation. It is not land that the federal government set aside as a reservation for the Cherokee, though, it's land that the Cherokee purchased for themselves in the later part of the nineteenth century, which is under a protective trust from the federal government. Enrolled members have the right to buy, sell,

and own the land. So the parkway planners wanted to acquire fifteen miles of right away across the Kuala boundary near the southern end of the Parkway route, but the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is a federally recognized tribe and a sovereign indigenous nation. This was also happening after the nineteen thirty four Indian Reorganization Act, also called the Indian New Deal, which had shifted the federal government's policy toward indigenous people as one of tribal sovereignty and indigenous

self determination. There were multiple laws and federal policies and agencies involved with this, which meant that the State of North Carolina could not just condemn this land and acquire it under eminent domain the way that it could with non indigenous landowners outside the Kuala boundary. This conflict had

so many layers. The Cherokee in North Carolina were organized and politically savvy, but they had also already been struggling economically before the start of the Great Depression, and the Great Depression had, of course worsened the situation. Most of the land and the Kuala Boundary was not arable farmland, so much of the tribe's income had been coming from timber, but the timber industry had collapsed in the wake of

the depression. The fifteen miles of right of way that were wanted for the parkway included some of the tribes limited amount of arable land.

If the parkway passed through part of the Kuala boundary, what would the expectations be for the Cherokee living near it or for the Cherokee elsewhere in the Kuala Boundary. There were very real and reasonable fears that the Parkway could turn Cherokee into basically a human zoo, with non indigenous tourists expecting to see people in what they imagined was a Cherokee way of life. There were some similar concerns for the rest of the Parkway as well, about

whether tourists would be expecting to see stereotypical hillbillies. But this of course had some additional nuances for the Cherokee.

of way. Principal Chief Jarrett Blythe had been opposed to the initial route through the Kuala boundary, but was open to finding some kind of compromise, But a vocal opposition had also developed within the tribe, and one of the most outspoken opponents to the park parkway was Vice Chief Fred Bauer. This dispute went on for more than three years, and by nineteen thirty nine, the Department of the Interior was starting to explore whether there was a way to

seize the land under eminent domain. The state of North Carolina started working on a bill that would allow for this. All of these issues became part of the Cherokee tribal election in nineteen thirty nine. In that election, Blythe was overwhelmingly re elected as Principal Chief and Bower and some of his supporters were voted out. Afterward, the Cherokee Tribal Council voted in support of a new plan, a higher elevation ridge route for the parkway that would not impact

the tribe's arable land. This was contingent upon financial compensation for that right of way, as well as a commitment from the federal government to build a regular highway to the Kuala boundary to give the Cherokee better access to the rest of the region and be all of this was settled in nineteen forty one. The Cherokee were paid forty thousand dollars for that right of way, and the federal government later built a stretch of US Highway nineteen

through the Cherokee area. In addition to all of this, the Blue Ridge Parkway was intended to be a linear park, connecting a string of larger parks with campgrounds, picnic areas, trails, and other amenities along it. Some of those larger parks were built, but not all the ones that were part

of the original plan. Land for recreation areas beyond the right of way for the road was acquired through the Depression era relief agency called the Resettlement Administration, through private donations and through transfers of land already controlled by the US Forest Service. Several parks along the parkway were also privately donated, including Moses H. Cone Memorial Park and Julian

Price Memorial Park in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. We will get to the actual building of the parkway after another sponsor break. We mentioned two of the people who were heavily involved in the design of the Blue Ridge Parkway earlier, Stanley L.

general inspirations for the Blue Ridge Parkway. He also took inspiration from the work of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who is sometimes called the father of American landscape architecture. Abbot and the other landscape architects who worked on the parkway wanting to fit the road into the mountains as if nature had put it there. From above, it would look like a ribbon curving through the landscape. This also

applied to the view from the road. He was a big proponent of the scenic easements that we mentioned earlier. Gabbitt also developed a visual approach to the parkway that emphasized preserving and conserving the land and its history, while also keeping a managed landscape in mind for the future,

sort of like a Skyline Drive. This is a thing where you look out from the parkway and it looks like it has always been that way and its natural state, but it's really a managed view that people are seeing. The construction also had a lot of similarities to Skyline Drive, including using local stone for bridges and tunnels, and focusing on native plants in view of the parkway. Lots of other roads cross under the parkway, and these bridges for the parkway were often built from local stone with a

very similar rustic look. This also applied to things like retaining walls, bridges, and tunnels to be built along the parkway itself. Forty five different construction units were involved in building the parkway in the late nineteen thirties. As was the case with Skyline Drive, private contractors were involved, but much of the labor was paid for by Depression era relief programs, including the Work's Progress Administration, the Emergency Relief Administration,

and the Civilian Conservation Corps. There were four CCC units that worked on the parkway, and one of them, the Gaylax Virginia Camp, was for black men. The CCC didn't build the road itself, but was focused on things like overlooks and amenities, as well as grading slopes and planting trees and other plants. While Skyline Drive and Shenandoah National Park were both opened by the late nineteen thirties, the Blue Ridge Parkway was a lot longer and a lot

more complex. A stretch of about twenty miles in North Carolina near the Virginia border was open and ready for travel by nineteen thirty nine, and by the time the United States became involved in World War II, about one hundred and fifty miles were complete and the first concessions had opened to the public. Like Shenandoah National Park, there wasn't an overall racial segregation policy for the park, but the initial plans had involved the construction of segregated facilities.

Only some of those facilities had been built by the time the war started. New construction work on the parkway had been suspended entirely during the war, and three camps of conscientious objectors from the Civilian Public Service worked to maintain what was already done or in progress. Most of the sections that had opened were not widely used during the war due to shortages of rubber and fuel and

a ban on driving for leisure. When construction resumed after the war, it was without building an new segregated facilities, but the parkway did still exist within the racial attitudes of the areas that it was passing through. To be clear, though those communities were not exclusively white. The parkway passes through areas that are home to Melungeons, which are a multi racial ethnic group in the Appalachian Mountains. That's a term that started out as a slur but was later reclaimed.

The parkway also passed through a number of black communities, some of them dating back to before the Civil War, and some of the land that was acquired for the parkway was acquired from black families, including the Saunders family, who had a farm near Peaks of Water, Virginia, which they sold to the government in nineteen forty two. There's also a cemetery that meadows of Dan Baptist Church at Malpost one seventy seven that's believed to be a slave cemetery.

We also talked about the southern end of the Parkway running through Cherokee Lands in the Kuala Boundary earlier in the episode. After the war, construction on the parkway was also a lot slower. There was no longer the same sense of urgency about job creation that had propelled the earlier work on the parkway, and most of the Depression era relief programs that had been paying for labor had

already ended. In nineteen fifty six, the National Park Service launched a ten year project called Mission sixty six, which was a plan to expand the park Service handle a lot of badly needed maintenance and finished projects that had been languishing, including the Blue Ridge Parkway, which still was not done, and by the end of Mission sixty six only seven point seven miles of the parkway were still unfinished.

Morton finally reached an agreement in the nineteen seventies. A lot of the descriptions of this agreement make it sound as though Morton's approval required the National Park Service to build a viaduct around the side of the Grandfather Mountain to protect the ecosystem, but a viaduct had really been part of the plan, since parkway planners had decided to pursue a higher elevation route than the one that Morton's

grandfather had originally approved. The Lenco Viaduct around Grandfather Mountain was, for the time an engineering marvel. It's made of one hundred and fifty three pre cast concrete segments, each of them unique. They are held up by piers that were

cast on site. The bridge itself was the only approach to the construction site and heavy machinery would have damaged the landscape, so all of the work was done from above, with equipment being brought in by helicopter and the segments placed one at a time by a crane that moved

along the viaduct as it was building it. This one two hundred and fifty foot viaduct was finished in nineteen eighty three and lost almost ten million dollars, and it earned eight different professional awards, including the nineteen eighty four Presidential Award for Design Excellence.

Over the course of its construction, it also served as a training ground for engineers for essentially a generation, about ten percent of the engineers at the US Bureau of Public Roads. Later the Federal Highway Administration went through part

of their training working on the Blue Ridge Parkway. When the parkway was first proposed as a connection between Shenandoah National Park and Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the assumption was that a lot of people would be using it to travel from one park to the other, but by the time the parkway was mostly finished in nineteen sixty six, there were way more options to do that thanks to the Interstate Highway System spearheaded under the administration of President

Dwight D. Eisenhower, and many other road building projects. When the parkway is fully open, which currently it is not, it takes at least ten or twelve hours to drive from one end to the other, and that's without really stopping to eat or go to the bathroom or you know, look at anything. Some people do the whole thing as more of a five or six day road trip with

stops and sightseeing. But if your goal is just to get from one of those parks to the other, today there are highway routes that take more like five or six hours, as long as you don't run into a lot of traffic problems.

supports almost eighteen thousand jobs. Obviously, though those communities relationships with tourism are very complicated, the.

insects like emerald ashboor and hemlock woolly adelgin. And of course, there are issues like air pollution and runoff from roads and parking lots that would not be there without the parkway.

of May twenty twenty five. These closed sections are all in North Carolina. The Virginia section is open apart from some roadwork unrelated to Helene and the Roanoke Mountain Loop, which has been closed since a landslide in twenty eighteen that was caused by the remnants of Hurricane Michael. There has been some funding allocated to repairing all of this immense destruction, including disaster relief funding allocated by Congress and

funds from the Federal Highway Administration. This includes thirty two point six million dollars in funding to be split between the US Forest Service and the National Park Service for post Hellene repairs to the parkway. But this will probably be a many, many years long recovery process, especially since the National Park Service another federal agencies, have already been faced with budget cuts and layoffs under the Trump administration.

There's a massive reduction enforced plan for the National Park Service that as of this moment that we're recording, still seems to be tentative, not fully clear exactly how damaging the impact will be for all of that.

I thought you may like hearing more about the state or research for bees nowadays. While I can't speak for every state, I spent the better part of a year surveying bee species in central Louisiana as an undergraduate research under my college's entomologist, who has a fondness for them. Biology and especially entomology are interesting fields because despite how long humans have observed the natural world, there is still a lot we don't know. Part of the issue is

the disbalanced ratio of entomologists to insects. There are so so many insects that most entomologists focus entirely on a select few groups, or even just one group. There's also a severe lack of funding for biological sciences in general.

But I'm sure you could have guessed that yourselves I was faced with that unknown in a very real way when I started doing research for my proposal for the survey finding and found next to no prior research on bees in the state outside of two heavily populated areas. So when you mentioned the Africanized honeybees, I found it a bit amusing, because while it is entirely possible that

they're in Louisiana, we have no idea. Even my studies barely scratched the surface of the species present that there is a bigger project looking into it right now that I'm not part of. Like you said, though, honeybees have varying effects depending on the conditions they are in. On the green of our campus last spring, we did not find a single bee that was not the European honeybee or Eastern carpenter bee. On the other hand, and the few times we collected in a prairie with only native forage,

we didn't find a single one. Just as well, the physical differences between the Africanized bees and normal honey bees is so minor that it would likely be overlooked entirely unless one was specifically looking for it or had familiarity with them. There were even times we got the bees that matched none of the resources we had available, but due to the complicated nature of DNA testing such a small organism, we didn't have much luck figuring out what

they were past their family. I'd also like to mention for bee lovers you might like to check out the Xerxes Society as and official pollinator gardens. You are likely to find many lovely places you can support in some way and go observe bees and other pollinators like butterflies, beetles, and moths. I love your podcasts and everything you guys do, and I have been listening since shortly after both of

you were on as hosts. When I first listened to I was in a dark place in my life, and hearing the two of you helped me feel human again and less lonely. Their podcast has gotten me through a lot of hard times nowadays. I have a long commute and a lot of time where I do tedious lab work, so having you guys to listen to is one of my favorite ways to spend the time. Even subjects I don't think will be interesting at verse always end up

intriguing me once I start the episode. Mayve goes on to say that that as a longtime lover of Cela Camp. The episode on Marjorie Courtney Lattery was a favorite, and there are also some suggestions for future episodes. And we have some pet tax with a dots named Fenrier who is called Finny, a lab mix Sissy, an orange cat named Nubby, a fuzz muffin Teddy who likes to shed over everybody, and a mandatory alligator picture. And then uh may have apologizes for being wordy. You do not need

to apologize. This was a lovely email with a lot of very awesome pet pictures. All of these animals are very very cute. I'm gonna click until I get to the alligator one.

was a bit ago, is lovely. If you'd like to send us a note about this or any other podcast or at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere else you like to get your podcasts. 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.