Stories

Construction of the Big Meadows developed area began in 1935 as part of a park master plan. It is significant in the areas of entertainment/recreation and politics/government for its association with Shenandoah National Park as one of the first eastern national parks, and it is associated with the early twentieth century movement to accommodate the growing popularity of the automobile while also conserving natural and scenic areas.

Miriam M. Sizer was an educator hired to study the mountain residents in Nicholson, Weakley, Corbin, and Richards Hollows, to make recommendations as to solutions to the problems inherent in relocation. Her beliefs and bias, supported by George Freeman Pollock and William E. Carson, have influenced popular thought for three generations.

Located on the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge, in the shadow of Old Rag Mountain in Madison County, Virginia, the three hollows were home to approximately 460 persons when Shenandoah National Park was created in the 1930s, having been continuously occupied by settlers of European descent since the late eighteenth century.

By the time the National Park Service was established in August 1916, Congress had created nine national parks and twelve national monuments. Although these sites were under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of the Interior, most were in the West and were run by the Army which saw its function strictly as the protection of timber and mineral resources and the prevention of homesteading.

Primary source documents reveal the thinking and decision making of park managers, from the highest level of the National Park Service to local concessionaires, surrounding the creation of segregated facilities in Shenandoah National Park in the 1930s and the desegregation of the same facilities by 1950.

The continued review of Civilian Conservation Corps "Job Application and Completion Records" in the archives further reveals the extent of landscape manipulation undertaken during the park's formative years.

There were many people who played a role in the foundation of Shenandoah National Park. Learn about how these people, who together represented public committees, private interests, local government all the way up to the Department of the Interior, brought the idea of an eastern national park into reality, and the events along the way that shaped a section of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains into the Shenandoah National Park we know today.

The Blue Ridge Mountains running along the East side of the Shenandoah Valley make up the core of Shenandoah National Park where Skyline Drive runs along their crest. What visitors may not realize is that they are driving along one of the most significant tools the Confederacy utilized during the American Civil War.

Early scientific evaluation of the park's forest communities conducted by the Civilian Conservation Corps echoed early publications that described the woodland wonders of Shenandoah. It was not until the 1960s that a new environmental history of the park began to be developed, one that characterized the pre-park natural history as one of wanton agricultural abuse, severe erosion, and the clear-cutting of the forest.

The first Civilian Conservation Corps camps in national parks were located at what would become Shenandoah National Park. Over 1,000 young men would eventually work at one of ten camps in and around Shenandoah. From the gentle curves of Skyline Drive to the stone walls enclosing the overlooks, the projects that these young men took on shaped Shenandoah National Park as we know it today.