The Blue Ridge Heritage Project

Honoring the Children of Shenandoah

Skyline Drive, Shenandoah National Park; courtesy of the National Park Service

By Beth Peterson

In 1934, a farmer in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia read an eviction notice. He read it again—just to be sure—before silently laying it on the kitchen table. “There must be some confusion,” he said to his wife.

Years prior, the Commonwealth of Virginia had obtained permission from the Federal Government under President Calvin Coolidge to create a national park. The farmer’s home, as well as the homes of many of his friends and relatives, sat right in the middle of the park’s proposed location. The farmer, along with many others, had been asked to leave. The Public Lands and Surveys Committee had even offered compensation in exchange for the land. But the farmer, along with many others, had declined the offer.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the state, excitement over the park grew. “A national park near the nation’s capital” was a catchphrase on everyone’s lips. In the wake of the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, the tourism and revenue a park like this would generate for the state of Virginia was too enticing to pass up.

“There must be some confusion,” the farmer wrote in a letter to the Public Lands and Surveys Committee the next day. “I inherited this farm from my father, who inherited it from his.” The farmer waited for a response. He remained hopeful.

Photo of a farm in what would later become Shenandoah National Park; courtesy of the Library of Congress

Generational Foundations

For three generations, the farmer’s family had lived in the little Virginia farmhouse his grandfather built, using what he had available to him in the hollow. A stream running through the property had provided smooth, flat stones for the foundation.

From the surrounding hills came lumber for the house. Those wood planks, now weathered and gray, gave away the farmhouse’s age. But it was all the sturdier for it, having settled into the hillside as permanently as the lichen-covered boulders cropping up around it. The farmer’s mother and father, along with his grandparents and an infant daughter, rested in the family plot just up the hill, between the farmhouse and the apple orchard.