Skyline Drive's One Hundred and Five Miles: What Drove People Out and What Drew Them In

The Blue Ridge was not wilderness when the engineers came. A century of timber cutting had stripped much of the mountain cover. The chestnut blight of nineteen oh four had killed billions of trees across the Appalachians. The farms in the hollows were subsistence operations on land that had never been particularly fertile. The visionaries who promoted a national park in the southern Blue Ridge could point honestly at a landscape in genuine ecological distress and argue that federal management would restore it.

They were right about that part. The forest you see from Skyline Drive today, dense and green, is a recovery, not a remnant. The Civilian Conservation Corps planted millions of trees in Shenandoah between nineteen thirty-three and nineteen forty-two, working on the same ridgelines where they were also building the road. The mountain ecosystem has spent ninety years coming back.

Skyline Drive runs one hundred and five miles along the crest of the Blue Ridge from Front Royal in the north to Rockfish Gap in the south, where it joins the Blue Ridge Parkway continuing into North Carolina. It was built between nineteen thirty-one and nineteen thirty-nine, primarily by Civilian Conservation Corps labor. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in two thousand and eight.

Three forces made this road. The young men of the CCC, most of them from Depression-era poverty, who graded and paved and laid every stone overlook. The mountain families who had lived in the hollows and were removed to create the park the road runs through. And the restored forest that needed generations of recovery to become the landscape you are moving through now.

Every mile of it is a product of all three. The view from any overlook is not a fixed truth about this mountain. It is a result.