Linn Cove Viaduct
Near Banner Elk, North Carolina
The Linn Cove Viaduct is the last piece of the Blue Ridge Parkway ever built, and perhaps its most ingenious. When construction on the Parkway began in nineteen thirty-five, engineers assumed this seven-mile stretch around Grandfather Mountain would be the easy part. It turned out to be the hardest.
Landowner Hugh Morton refused to allow conventional blasting, so designers had to invent something new. The result is a twelve-hundred-forty-three-foot curved bridge made of one hundred fifty-three precast concrete segments, each weighing fifty tons. Builders lowered each piece into place from above, working from the bridge outward, so that heavy equipment never touched the ground beneath.
The viaduct opened on September eleventh, nineteen eighty-seven, exactly fifty-two years after the Parkway's first groundbreaking. It remains one of the most environmentally sensitive highway structures ever built in the United States.
