The Blue Ridge Parkway: Four Hundred Sixty-Nine Miles Without a Billboard

When Congress formally authorized the Blue Ridge Parkway in nineteen thirty-six, it was described as a scenic road connecting Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina. What it became, over fifty-two years of construction, was something more specific: the longest linear national park in the United States, four hundred sixty-nine miles of restricted right-of-way with no commercial trucks, no billboards, no development permitted along the corridor.

The design rules were intentional and political. The Parkway's first superintendent, Sam Weems, fought to keep commercial interests off the right-of-way against constant pressure from local interests and state highway departments. The rule held: you cannot build a gas station on the Blue Ridge Parkway. You cannot put up a billboard. Fuel and food appear only at lodges and visitor centers spaced across the route, and there are long stretches with neither.

What the Parkway also did, along its corridor, was displace mountain farming families whose land it crossed, acquire right-of-way through communities that had no political voice in the decision, and erase the human geography of the central Blue Ridge as thoroughly as the Smokies had erased the human geography of the Smokies. The Depression-era federal government had a pattern.

The Folk Art Center at Milepost three eighty-two, headquarters of the Southern Highland Craft Guild, is one of the few places on the Parkway where the material culture of the people who were here before the Parkway exists alongside the road itself. The Guild was founded in nineteen thirty as an effort to convert traditional Appalachian crafts into a market economy that could sustain the craftspeople making them. The Folk Art Center opened in nineteen eighty and offers free admission.