Skyland and the Displacement He Romanticized

George Freeman Pollock arrived in the Blue Ridge in the eighteen eighties as a young man with a mining speculation and left as the impresario of one of the most popular resorts on the East Coast. He built Skyland, a collection of cabins and tent platforms and eventually proper lodge buildings, at the highest point in the future Shenandoah National Park. Washington socialites came for the air. Writers and artists came for the views. Theodore Roosevelt came, reportedly, for the hunting.

Pollock was also a genuine conservationist by the standards of his era. When federal officials began talking in the nineteen twenties about creating a national park in the southern Appalachians, he lobbied hard for the Blue Ridge location, and he lobbied effectively. The park that Congress authorized in nineteen twenty-six incorporated Skyland. The value of his property increased accordingly.

He wrote a memoir about his life in the mountains, describing the people who lived in the Blue Ridge hollows with the affectionate condescension of a man who regarded them as part of the scenery. They were colorful, he wrote. They were quaint. They had a kind of freedom that modern life had lost. What they were not, in Pollock's telling, was people with legal claims to their land, with community networks built over generations, with reasons to stay that had nothing to do with picturesque poverty.

The five hundred families who were removed from the Blue Ridge hollows between nineteen thirty-four and nineteen thirty-eight to make the park that Pollock had lobbied for are documented now by the park's own historians. The Corbins of Nicholson Hollow. The Weakleys. The Dodson family. Pollock's resort is still operating. It is the highest point on Skyline Drive, at three thousand six hundred and eighty feet. The view from here is the same view it has always been. What changed is who gets to look at it and on what terms.