The Linn Cove Viaduct: The Last Miles of the Longest Park

Congress formally authorized the Blue Ridge Parkway in nineteen thirty-six as a Depression-era public works project. By nineteen eighty-seven, fifty-two years later, four hundred sixty-one and a half miles were open to traffic. The last seven-point-seven miles were not.

The hold-up was Grandfather Mountain.

Hugh Morton had inherited the mountain from his grandfather and managed it as a private conservation and tourism property. He was also a powerful political figure in North Carolina, well-connected and well-funded, and when the original Parkway route would have required cutting directly through the mountain's fragile ridgeline, he blocked it. The legal and political standoff lasted decades.

The compromise was a bridge. Engineers from the firm Figg and Muller designed the Linn Cove Viaduct: a prefabricated segmental concrete S-curve, assembled from one hundred fifty-three precast segments that were manufactured off-site, trucked to the mountain, and lifted into place from below by crane. The method was chosen specifically to avoid bringing heavy construction equipment to the ridgeline, which would have caused exactly the damage Morton was trying to prevent. The viaduct uses seven piers, rests against the mountain face, and appears from below to be floating.

It was completed and opened in nineteen eighty-seven, closing the last gap in the longest linear national park in the United States. The short trail under the viaduct gives the best view of the engineering. Grandfather Mountain, privately owned and adjacent to the Parkway, charges a separate admission fee at its own entrance.

The Linn Cove Viaduct is now considered one of the most significant pieces of transportation engineering in the eastern United States. It exists because one man refused to let the state cut his mountain.