The Shenandoah Families: Five Hundred Homes the Park Required

The Corbin family had been in Nicholson Hollow since before the American Revolution. The Weakleys had farmed Weakley Hollow for generations. The Dodson family, the Lam family, the cave residents of Madison Run and Doyles River: these were not squatters or transients. They were people with names attached to specific hollows in the Blue Ridge because those families had named those hollows across a century and a half of continuous residence.

Congress authorized Shenandoah National Park in nineteen twenty-six. Virginia began acquiring land through condemnation proceedings covering thousands of individual parcels, more than five thousand by some counts. The approximately five hundred families living in the Blue Ridge hollows were not consulted about whether they wanted a park. Many were told they would benefit from removal, that the government would provide for them, that their old ways were holding them back from better lives in the lowlands. Contemporary government documents and newspaper coverage of the period describe the mountain communities in terms that were frank in their contempt: degenerate, inbred, backward, unable to provide for themselves.

Between nineteen thirty-four and nineteen thirty-eight, the families were moved. Some went voluntarily, accepting small payments and relocating to valley towns. Some held on until the last moment. Some were moved by Virginia state authorities in winter. The National Park Service classified approximately seventy individuals as too elderly or infirm to relocate themselves and placed them in county poor houses. At least two people died within weeks of removal.

A handful of elderly residents were granted lifetime licenses to remain on their land, living out their days in the park they had not asked for. The last of them, Annie Lee Bradley Shenk, died in nineteen seventy-nine. The park opened in nineteen thirty-six while removals were still underway. The brochure mentioned the scenery. It did not mention the families.

The park's own historians began seriously documenting the communities' names and stories in the nineteen nineties. The interpretive program now names some of the families. The hollows still carry their names. The park is roughly three hundred and thirteen square miles of what was, living memory away from the people now driving through it, someone else's home.