Rockfish Gap: Where the Skyline Drive Ends and the Nation Begins

Rockfish Gap sits at the southern end of Skyline Drive at milepost one hundred and five, where the road crosses Interstate Sixty-Four and becomes the Blue Ridge Parkway continuing south toward North Carolina. The gap is at roughly nineteen hundred feet, one of the lower natural passes through the central Blue Ridge, and it has been a crossing point and a meeting place for long enough that the history here runs in layers.

Thomas Jefferson knew this gap well. Monticello sits roughly ten miles to the east. In August of eighteen eighteen, Jefferson convened what became known as the Rockfish Gap Commission at the tavern here, a meeting to select the site and plan the curriculum of what would become the University of Virginia. Jefferson chaired the meeting, argued for Charlottesville over competing sites at Lexington and Staunton, and won. The report the commission produced, which Jefferson largely wrote himself, became the founding document of the university chartered the following year. It is the tavern meeting where the institution was decided.

The gap also marked a significant point in the survey of the route of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which was competing with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in the eighteen twenties for the right to connect the Atlantic seaboard to the interior. The gap was too high for a practical canal route, a fact that helped determine that the canal would follow the Potomac rather than push south through the mountains.

The Skyline Drive reached this point in nineteen thirty-nine, completing a construction project that had begun at Front Royal in nineteen thirty-one. The Blue Ridge Parkway, which continued from this gap to the Great Smoky Mountains, had been authorized under the same New Deal programs but was built over a longer span, with the final section near Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina not finished until nineteen eighty-seven.

At Rockfish Gap, the end of one road is the beginning of another. The four-hundred-and-sixty-nine mile Blue Ridge Parkway that picks up here is the most visited unit in the entire National Park System, measured by total annual visitors. The driver leaving Shenandoah at this gap and continuing south is entering the longest rural parkway in the United States.