Humpback Rocks: Milepost Five and a Mountain Farm That Refuses to Disappear

Humpback Rocks sits at milepost five-point-eight on the Blue Ridge Parkway, close enough to the northern terminus at Rockfish Gap that travelers heading south often reach it within the first quarter hour. But it repays the stop. The rocks themselves rise to three thousand and eighty feet, their exposed granite face jutting from the ridge like the hump of a great animal surfacing from the forest.

The name is old. Settlers named the outcrop in the mid nineteenth century, when the Howardsville Turnpike crossed this ridge on its way from the Shenandoah Valley to the Virginia Piedmont. The turnpike was one of the main freight corridors across the narrow Blue Ridge before the railroad tunnels came, and Humpback Rocks served as a landmark that teamsters could pick out from miles away to keep their bearings.

But what makes this stop genuinely distinctive is the Mountain Farm Trail at the base of the rocks. The National Park Service has assembled a collection of original nineteenth-century log structures, a cabin, a barn, a chicken house, a springhouse, moved here from the surrounding hollows when the parkway was built in the nineteen thirties and forties. The structures are not replicas. They are the actual buildings where actual families cooked, slept, stored food through winter, and worked land that the government eventually acquired for the parkway right-of-way.

The people who lived in these mountains practiced a form of self-sufficient Appalachian agriculture that had changed very little from the seventeen hundreds: corn, beans, pork, apple brandy, bees for honey, a milk cow if you were fortunate. During summer months, costumed interpreters demonstrate that life for passing visitors, churning butter, splitting rails, demonstrating the mechanics of a hand-cranked well.

The view from the summit of Humpback Rocks, a steep half-mile hike above the farm trail, sweeps north into the southern end of Shenandoah National Park and east across the Piedmont patchwork of farms. On clear days, when the haze lifts, you can see for sixty miles.