Big Meadows: The Clearing That Predates the Park by Two Thousand Years

Big Meadows is an anomaly. The Blue Ridge is forested ridge and hollow in almost every direction you look from the Skyline Drive, but here, at roughly thirty-five hundred feet on the crest of the mountain, the trees open into a hundred and forty acres of open meadow, wetland, and heath. It looks like it belongs to a different landscape.

It does, in a sense. The meadow is not a natural artifact of the geology. The forest wants to reclaim it. Without active management, red spruce and other conifers would close in from the edges within a generation or two. Big Meadows has stayed open because people have been keeping it open, through fire and grazing and now through the National Park Service's deliberate management burns, for somewhere between one thousand and two thousand years.

Archaeology conducted in and around the meadow complex has found evidence of Indigenous use reaching back roughly ten thousand years. The higher concentration of finds near the meadow itself suggests it was a preferred hunting and camping location, which makes ecological sense: an open highland clearing in a forested ridge is exactly where deer and elk congregate, and it provides visibility that dense forest does not. The people who kept this clearing open with periodic burning understood what they were doing. They were maintaining a landscape that served them.

European settlers who came into the Blue Ridge hollows in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries used the meadow as high-altitude pasturage. Mountain families from the surrounding hollows, some of them the same families who would later be displaced to create the national park, grazed cattle and sheep on the Big Meadows plateau through the summer months, driving herds up when the lower valley grass ran thin. The archaeology finds and the grazing records and the park service burn schedules are all connected to the same clearing, maintained by very different people across a very long time.

The camp area here was one of the Civilian Conservation Corps's major work sites in the nineteen thirties. The lodge, the stone walls along the parking area, and much of the trail network spreading out from Big Meadows were built by CCC enrollees between nineteen thirty-three and nineteen forty-two. The meadow they worked in had been kept open by people for a hundred generations before them.