Case Study 2: Building the Blue Ridge Parkway — Whose Scenery Was It?

A Road to Nowhere (Except Beauty)

In November 1933, as the first wave of New Deal programs was reshaping the American landscape, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes approved a proposal that seemed, on its face, almost frivolous amid the urgency of the Depression: a scenic highway through the mountains. Not a highway to connect cities. Not a road to carry commerce. A road for driving — slowly, deliberately — through beauty.

The idea had originated with Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd and had been championed by politicians and boosters from Virginia and North Carolina who saw in the proposed road an economic lifeline for their mountain counties. If a scenic highway could connect the newly authorized Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to the planned Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina, the mountains themselves would become a destination — and the communities along the route would benefit from the tourist traffic.

The Blue Ridge Parkway was born, like so many things in Appalachia, from a combination of genuine love for the landscape, practical economic calculation, and the confidence of powerful men that they knew what was best for a place and its people.

The Route and the Removal

The Parkway's route — 469 miles along the crest of the Blue Ridge and the southern Appalachians — was determined by engineers and landscape architects who surveyed the mountains with an eye for maximum scenic impact. The route was designed to follow the ridgeline where possible, providing sweeping views of the valleys below and the ranges beyond. Where the ridgeline was inaccessible or insufficiently scenic, the route dipped into gaps and circled peaks, always oriented toward the view.

The engineers' eye for beauty did not account for the people who lived along the proposed route.

The land for the Parkway — a corridor of right-of-way approximately 800 feet wide for 469 miles, plus additional acreage for overlooks, recreation areas, and scenic buffer zones — had to be acquired from its owners. The states of Virginia and North Carolina undertook this acquisition, using a combination of donation, purchase, and eminent domain. The process took years. It displaced hundreds of families.

In the mountain communities along the route, the Parkway's arrival was experienced as a disruption — sometimes welcomed, sometimes resented, always disorienting. Farmers who had worked their land for generations learned that a federal highway was coming through their property. Some sold willingly, seeing an opportunity to get cash for land that was already marginal. Others fought the acquisition, unwilling to surrender land that had been in their families for a century or more. Those who resisted were, in the end, overridden. Eminent domain proceedings condemned their property, and the courts determined the compensation — typically an amount that the landowners considered inadequate and the government considered fair.

The displacement was not just a matter of losing land. The Parkway's route bisected farms, cutting owners off from fields, orchards, springs, and outbuildings that were on the far side of the road. Community roads that had connected neighborhoods for generations were severed — closed off or rerouted because they intersected the Parkway. Families that had visited each other by walking across a ridge suddenly found a federal highway between them, a road they could not cross on foot and were not permitted to use for local travel.

Designing the View

The landscape architects who designed the Parkway were doing something that had never been done at this scale: creating an extended aesthetic experience, a road whose purpose was not transportation but perception. Every element of the design was calculated to produce a specific visual effect.

Stanley Abbott, the Parkway's first resident landscape architect, articulated a vision of the road as a "museum of managed American countryside." The idea was that the Parkway would present not just natural beauty but a curated version of Appalachian rural life — farmsteads, split-rail fences, mountain meadows, old mills — that would give visitors a sense of the region's pastoral character. The key word was "managed." Nothing about the Parkway's visual experience was accidental.

The management took several forms:

Selective framing. Overlooks were sited to maximize scenic views and minimize views of anything that might disrupt the pastoral illusion — strip mines, sawmills, junkyards, commercial development, or ordinary poverty. The carefully maintained tree line along the Parkway functioned as a screen, hiding the actual Appalachia that existed just out of sight.

Historical staging. The Park Service preserved and in some cases reconstructed "pioneer" structures along the Parkway — log cabins, split-rail fences, gristmills — that presented a romanticized version of mountain life. These structures were emptied of their human context. A cabin that had been someone's home became a tourist attraction. A fence that had enclosed someone's garden became a photo opportunity. The artifacts of mountain life were preserved while the people who had created and used them were removed.

Landscape maintenance. The meadows and open fields that give the Parkway much of its visual character were maintained by the Park Service through mowing, prescribed burning, and active management. Left alone, these areas would quickly revert to forest — the natural succession of vegetation in the southern Appalachians. The "timeless" mountain meadows that visitors admire are, in fact, artificially maintained by the same federal agency that built the road.

Memo from Stanley Abbott, Blue Ridge Parkway landscape architect, 1936: "The Parkway should be designed to present the motorist with a continuous experience of beauty — the beauty of the mountain landscape in its natural form, enhanced and framed by the design of the road itself. The indigenous culture of the mountains — the small farms, the old buildings, the traditional crafts — should be presented as elements of the landscape, contributing to the overall composition."

National Archives, Blue Ridge Parkway Design Records.

Note the language: the "indigenous culture of the mountains" should be "presented as elements of the landscape." People and their way of life are reduced to visual components — things to be arranged for the pleasure of the motorist. The phrase "contributing to the overall composition" treats mountain culture as a design element, something to be curated and displayed rather than something that exists on its own terms.

The Parkway and the Mountain Communities

For the communities along the route, the Parkway created a peculiar condition: they were simultaneously on display and invisible. The Parkway's designers wanted mountain life to be visible — the picturesque version of it, anyway — but they did not want the actual conditions of mountain life to intrude on the visitor's aesthetic experience.

This meant that a working farm whose fields and fences were visible from the Parkway was a valued part of the landscape — as long as it looked sufficiently picturesque. But a farm with rusting equipment, a tar-paper shack, or any evidence of the actual poverty that characterized much of the region was not welcome in the view. The Parkway created a hierarchy of visibility in which beauty was displayed and reality was screened.

For the people living along the Parkway, this was disorienting. They were objects of the tourist gaze — people whose lives were observed, photographed, and interpreted by strangers driving slowly past their homes. The dynamic was not new; it echoed the "local color" tourism of the late nineteenth century (Chapter 14), in which urban visitors came to the mountains to observe the quaint customs of the mountaineers. The Parkway institutionalized this dynamic, building it into the infrastructure itself.

The economic benefits of the Parkway were real but unevenly distributed. Communities near the Parkway's access points — particularly Asheville, North Carolina, and the Virginia towns near the northern terminus — benefited substantially from tourist spending. But communities that were on the Parkway but not near commercial access points received tourists who drove through without stopping, who admired the scenery but did not contribute to the local economy. The Parkway brought viewers but not always dollars.

The Linn Cove Viaduct and the Long Completion

The Parkway was not completed for more than fifty years after its inception. The last section — the Linn Cove Viaduct, a 1,243-foot elevated roadway that curves around the face of Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina — was not completed until 1983, and the full Parkway was not open to continuous travel until 1987.

The delay was partly technical: the Linn Cove section required engineering solutions that did not exist when the Parkway was conceived. The viaduct, designed to avoid disturbing the fragile ecology of Grandfather Mountain, was built from the top down — segments lowered by crane and assembled in place — using innovative construction techniques that earned it recognition as an engineering landmark.

But the delay was also a story of resistance. Hugh Morton, the owner of Grandfather Mountain, fought the Parkway's original proposed route for decades, arguing that blasting a road through the mountain would destroy its ecological integrity. Morton's resistance — fueled by a combination of conservation conviction, property rights, and economic interest (he operated a tourist attraction on the mountain) — forced the redesign that produced the viaduct. It was a rare instance in which a private landowner successfully altered a federal infrastructure project.

Whose Beauty?

The Blue Ridge Parkway is, by any measure, a magnificent achievement. It is one of the most beautiful drives in the world. It has introduced millions of people to the Appalachian mountains and generated billions of dollars in tourism revenue over its lifetime. It has preserved a corridor of scenic landscape that might otherwise have been developed.

But the question the chapter poses — whose scenery was it? — remains. The beauty that the Parkway presents was not created by the Parkway. It was there before the road, and it was experienced, daily, by the people who lived in it. The Parkway did not discover this beauty. It appropriated it — framed it, managed it, and made it available for consumption by millions of people who would never know the names of the families who were removed to make the view available.

The Parkway's designers understood the mountains as a landscape to be seen. The people who lived in the mountains understood them as a place to live. These are fundamentally different relationships with the same land, and the Parkway's creation prioritized the first over the second — the experience of the visitor over the life of the resident.

This is not a call to tear down the Blue Ridge Parkway. It is a call to see it clearly — to understand that the beauty it presents has a history, and that history includes loss. The overlooks do not tell you what they replaced. The scenic corridors do not reveal who used to live within them. The "unspoiled mountain landscape" was not unspoiled. It was managed, curated, and, in places, emptied.

To drive the Blue Ridge Parkway and see only beauty is to see half the story. To drive it and ask "who lived here?" is to begin to see the whole thing.

Discussion Questions

1. The chapter and this case study describe the Blue Ridge Parkway as presenting a "curated" version of Appalachian beauty. Is all landscape experience curated in some way — by the roads we drive, the trails we hike, the viewpoints where we stop? What makes the Parkway's curation different from, or similar to, other forms of landscape presentation?

2. Stanley Abbott described the Parkway as a "museum of managed American countryside." Is a working landscape — where people farm, live, and work — an appropriate subject for a museum? What happens when you turn someone's home into an exhibit?

3. The Parkway generated tourism revenue for some communities along its route while displacing others. Is this trade-off acceptable? Who should decide? What would a more equitable model of scenic road development look like?

4. The chapter draws a parallel between the Parkway's treatment of mountain communities and the "local color" tourism of the late nineteenth century. Do you see this parallel? Has the dynamic changed in the age of Instagram and social media tourism, or does the same pattern persist?

5. Imagine you are a farmer in the 1930s whose property is bisected by the proposed Parkway route. You are offered compensation for the right-of-way, but you will lose access to your fields on the far side of the road, and your daily life will be on display for tourists driving past. Write a letter to the Parkway superintendent describing your situation and your position.