- When I was young and in my prime, I left my home in Caroline.

Now all I do is set in time for all the folks I left behind.

I've got those blue ridge mountains, and I stand right here to say my grip is tied to travel and I'm scratching gravel to that blue ridge far away.

I see two heads up noise white.

- With the rise in popularity of the automobile in the early 20th century, Americans wanted to travel.

The Good Roads Movement was a national effort to improve the quality of American roads.

It began in the 1800s by bicyclists.

The movement gained momentum in the early 1900s when organizations like the American Automobile Association, known as the AAA, and the National Highway Protective Association were formed.

These groups lobbied for better road conditions and pushed the government for funding for road improvements.

Automobile motor clubs were forming and wanted access to the national parks.

In the early 1900s, North Carolina State Geological and Economic Director, Joseph Hyde Pratt, was determined to bring tourism to the North Carolina mountains.

He wanted a road with never forgotten mountain views.

Colonel Pratt was head of the Good Roads Movement in North Carolina and used his position to initiate the process.

He designed a scenic road along the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains from White Top Mountain near Marion, Virginia, to Tallulah Falls, Georgia.

This road was called the Crest of the Blue Ridge Highway.

Road construction started July of 1912 by Pratt's, Appalachian Highway Company of Chapel Hill.

When World War I broke out, it brought a halt to construction of the first mountain parkway.

At the end of World War I, there was a need to relieve the emotional trauma of the war.

That contributed to the 1920s anything goes mentality.

During the 20s, Americans experienced rapid growth and a period of dramatic change known as the Roaring 20s.

For the first time in history, city population outnumbered that of rural America.

The nation's wealth doubled in the 20s, leading to widespread prosperity.

During this period, many of the conveniences we take for granted today were developed and mass marketed.

Buying an automobile became affordable for the average American for the first time in history.

In 1923, Stephen T. Mather in his seventh annual report for the National Park Service wrote, "I would like to see additional national parks established east of the Mississippi."

There should be a section on the Appalachian range established as a national park and made accessible for public use and its development undertaken by federal funds.

In January 1924, Director Mather met with Herbert Work, Secretary of the Interior under Calvin Coolidge, and found him an enthusiastic supporter of his project.

Work immediately took steps to have a study conducted of the Southern Appalachian Mountains with the goal of finding areas that would be suitable for the National Park.

It was determined that the best way to do this would be to create a special committee for the task.

Everyone invited to join the committee agreed to join, and they all converged on March 26th, 1924 at 2:45 PM inside the office of Director Mather for the National Park Service.

Following a debate concerning a suitable name, the committee agreed that it should be referred to as the Southern Appalachian National Park Committee and sent out its first press release.

As the committee already had a large number of requests for examinations of territories, it decided to send out a questionnaire to all interested communities.

The committee wished to have it known that it considered its scope confined to the Southern Appalachian Mountains, not extending north of the mountain border of Maryland.

The committee had decided that after the questionnaire had been filled out and sent back, they would take them into account and assess which ones should be investigated with a visit.

This query, which was meant to gather essential information such as location, area, the highest and lowest altitude, and remarkable sites in all the proposed areas, it also inquired about any developments, whether the area had been logged and the probable cause of the land.

After reviewing and visiting a number of potential choices, the committee decided that the Great Smoky Mountains were the best option.

The reason for this was due to the tall peaks, deep valleys, rough terrains, and diverse range of trees, shrubs, and plants that could be found in the area.

The committee also studied the Blue Ridge of Virginia intently.

Even though it was lower in elevation than the Great Smokies and lacked some of the other features, they felt that it would be the ideal location to create the first national park in the Southern Appalachians.

Virginia's proximity to major cities meant up to 40 million visitors were within a day's drive of the state's attractions.

The greatest single feature was a potential skyline drive, a path along the mountaintops following a continuous ridge with views of the Shenandoah Valley thousands of feet below and the Piedmont planes stretching in the distance.

The beauty of the landscape was breathtaking, the windy roads, the vast views, a mesmerizing combination that few scenic drives in the world could rival.

Congress approved a bill on February 21st, 1925, granting $20,000 for surveying and evaluating the possible parks in the Great Smoky Mountains, the Shenandoah National Park, and Mammoth Cave in Kentucky.

Kentucky legislators would not support the bill without this inclusion.

This bill established the Southern Appalachian National Park Committee as an official commission.

The plan was to create the Shenandoah National Park first on 521,000 acres.

They later reduced it to 400,000 acres.

Congress wanted Virginia to purchase the land and give it to the federal government.

Up until that time, national parks had only been established on federally owned land or on land that was given to the government to be developed as parks.

President Calvin Coolidge signed a bill to establish the Great Smoky Mountain and Shenandoah National Parks with the goal of preserving its forest and wildlife.

Virginia's section of the Blue Ridge Mountains required the acquisition of 250,000 acres of land.

And once that was completed, the government would provide accommodations for visitors, develop roads and trails, stock fishing streams, and offer educational services about the region's history and natural beauty.

After the act was passed, the Commission on Conservation and Development from the state of Virginia wasted no time in raising funds to purchase the necessary land.

This was a daunting task as the approved areas consisted of thousands of privately owned parcels of land.

The money needed came from various sources, such as state appropriations, donations from citizens, and external sources.

The Great Smoky Mountain National Park would span land from Tennessee and North Carolina with 300,000 acres donated by the state and an additional 150,000 acres purchased with funds raised by state legislators, citizens, and even school children who collected $10 million.

Despite all the celebrations, one troubling aspect of the park's creation was often ignored, acquiring land from those who lived on it.

Unlike previous parks, Shenandoah and the Great Smokies had permanent residence, some with roots going back 250 years.

Inside Shenandoah alone were 465 families.

Over 2,000 people lived in remote areas and unaware of the plans for a new recreational area.

Most descended from immigrants owning land for farming or settling in the mountain sites as squatters.

The state of Virginia was working to acquire titles to this land as quickly as possible with plans to transfer it to the federal government once secured.

The Department of Interior's Office of National Parks, buildings and reservations would then begin developing the area similar to those of other national parks in the West.

Work progressed quickly until the Great Depression hit and obtaining funds became increasingly challenging.

Construction of the Skyline Drive, a scenic highway along the mountain range, began on June 18th, 1931, with funds allocated for national parks through the Emergency Construction Act.

The Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC, was being utilized for tasks such as building guardrails and controlling brush.

Shenandoah National Park was finished under the supervision of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was an enthusiastic supporter of the park in the Skyline Drive.

His civilian conservation corps established six camps in the park area, whose workers constructed roads and proved forest landscaping and wildlife conditions and fought fires.

Roosevelt also agreed to an extension of the drive southward, linking up the Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains national parks with a road that would become the Blue Ridge Parkway.

- At the turn of the century, the early 1900s, the profession of landscape architecture was really coming into its own.

The American Society of Landscape Architects had just been founded and it was very much promoting landscape architecture and an American style of naturalistic landscape design that kind of carried over from England, but American landscape architects were putting their own spin on it.

And this very much was the foundation for how the National Park Service was going to interject development into national parks.

This whole idea of the naturalistic design of landscapes was you would look at the existing landscape setting in terms of land form, the vegetation, plant massings, water features, and it, and you, the designs that you would develop very much would emulate and be in harmony with that existing landscape that surrounded the park that you were designing.

A lot of the landscape architects that were a part of that development at the turn of the century, Henry Hubbard Theodora Kimball there was a Frank Waugh Samuel Parsons, they were all writing books and textbooks that were being used in universities and that were teaching landscape architecture.

So the landscape architects and architects that would come to the Blue Ridge Parkway decades later to do that design were being schooled by these individuals and they were, their work was being studied by those.

And the team that came to the Blue Ridge Car - Parkway, I like to call them the great eight Thomas Vent in 1933 in December hired Stanley Abbott to be the first resident landscape architect for the Blue Ridge Parkway.

And Stanley was a graduate of Cornell University and degree in landscape architecture.

And from school, he went to New York to work for the West Cha - Westchester County Parks and Parkway Commission.

And there, he learned from some of the preeminent designers of parkways, just really the in and out of designing and planning parkways.

So Stanley Abbott was the first employee that came to the Blue Ridge Parkway, and he is really known as the visionary of the parkway.

He had the imagination to imagine more than just a scenic road to, to connect Shenandoah National Park with the Great Smokies National Park.

He had a whole different way of thinking about what that roadway should be.

It shouldn't just be the means from traveling from one location to another.

He brought on board next Edward Abuel.

Edward had been a fellow student as well as professor for Abbott at Cornell University.

And Abuel had a background in landscape architecture and architecture.

And so he was hired to be an assistant landscape architect, and he was going to be in charge of flagging and reconnaissance of the proposed route from Peaks of Otter in Virginia to all through North Carolina.

The third employee that came on board was Heinrich Van Gelder, and he also was an employee from the Westchester County Parks and Parks and Parkways.

And his background was really in, in parkway location and design.

And so he was going to be in charge of location of the parkway in, and so he was in charge of flagging and reconnaissance in Virginia.

The next person that was brought on board was Malcolm Byrd, another person from the Westchester County Parks and Parkways.

And Malcolm had a phenomenal sense and understanding of Eastern plant materials and was very much known for his ability to kind of design the landscape that would be on either side of the Parkway motor road.

So he was an incredible attribute for the Parkway, and hi- his job was going to be in terms of landscape development, and eventually he would have almost a thousand miles of landscape to design along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

The next person came was a park service employee employee, and his name was Kenneth Hall, and he was going to serve as one of the architects dealing with buildings on the parkway.

He did the original drawings of Mabry Mill that set the standard for how historic structures would be later documented in terms of drawings.

And so his, his architectural skills were put to use on a number of the structures on the parkway.

The next employee that was hired was Charlie Grossman, another architect, and he transferred from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

And Charlie was there to work on buildings and bridges, and he designed a lot of the small bridges that crossed streams in Southwestern Virginia.

He also did a lot of the grade separation structures that separated the parkway from major federal and state highways that crossed the parkway.

Did a lot, he did a lot of the stone design work on those.

He also worked with Abbott at the, at the Dowton Park development to do the working drawings for the lodge, gas station, and a coffee shop there.

The next employee that came was Robert Hall, and he transferred from Yellowstone, and he, they brought him in to work on the recreation areas.

He was going to develop, plan and develop the recreation areas along the parkway.

And the final team member of the grade eight was Daniel Levandowski, and Levandowski was a Russian immigrant, and he was an, an agronomist.

And they brought him in to work with adjacent landowners and farmers on soil conservation practices, because a lot of the lands in in the Southern Appalachians had been kind of farmed improperly or over-farmed, and so they wanted him to help work with the farmers to kind of improve their farming practices.

And they also wanted him to develop a program where the National Park Service, the Parkway, could lease federal lands back to farmers for them to use for pastures or as or as crop lands.

And so that was a very important program.

So those eight men were really kind of key to developing this whole idea of the Blue Ridge Parkway.

So essentially half, about half of the team came from the Westchester County Parks and Parkway Commission.

The others were Park Service employees that were transferred there because of their particular expertise.

And my guess is Thomas Vent, again, who was the chief architect for the Park Service, would have known all of these men personally, and he probably had a hand in getting them transferred to the Parkway.

So this, this was really the key group, but by 1941, there were 20 landscape architects assigned to the Blue Ridge Parkway, more than any other assigned to any other park.

When I first came to the Blue Ridge Parkway, it was like a blank strip of film for me.

I mean, I knew it was a national parkway.

I knew it was 469 miles long, but I really didn't understand much more about it.

So some of these things may help explain a little bit more about what a national parkway is.

It's a federally owned, elongated park that features a scenic road that you know, has embellishments of scenery, recreation natural and, and historic features, and it has enough merit and character to stand alone as its, for its national significance.

It's not seen as just the means of getting from one region to another.

It limits access from adjacent properties.

There's no commercial traffic.

So it's this design experience and scenic driving experience that's very different than driving the normal roads that you drive every day.

- My father, who was LOL Tier Senior, he didn't have any education.

He rented two mules and a wagon and a drag pan and started building streets in Durham and digging basements and foundations for buildings and things in Durham.

And one of the things he built was Mr.

Duke's mansion.

He did the landscaping and the grading all around, and then he did three, four more right close by.

One thing led to another, and over the period of the 20s and 30s he got to be a real large contractor and building roads in three or four states at that time.

And Blue Ridge Parkway came along, and as you probably know from your own history that Mr.

Roosevelt had decided that he was going to, and Mr.

Ickes decided they were going to help out the Appalachian area of North Carolina.

They were so poor, they were actually, as you know, they're dirt poor.

Some of them didn't even have heat in their houses, except for old stove wouldn't have heat at work.

So when the 1934 came along, it was past Congress and they got the first funds.

I don't remember what it was, it was somewhere six or $8 million to start it.

My father got the first contract that was let, but he worked constantly on the Blue Ridge Parkway, 1935 on up until the war time.

And as you know also from history that the Parkway was built between 35 and 41, and it was shut down in 41 due to the war.

And immediately after World War II, they cranked it up again, and my father went back in doing the work.

In fact, the the one at Mount Mitchell, that was one of the first contracts led after World War II.

Then on it was sort of hopscotch because all the contracts weren't let one by one by one.

There was one here and one there, one here and one there.

And there was a reason for that.

The reason was to put more of those people to work.

And in fact, that was the object of the whole thing is to put people to work.

And of course the CCC boys were out there.

They were building fire trail roads.

They weren't building highways.

They built fire trails in the, in the mountains, and they did an excellent job.

And they came on to I guess the last job that my father had must have been around, let's see, I'm going to say in the '50s.

I've forgotten what actual date, but I do remember sometime in the '50s.

Now in the '30s, when I was just 18 years old, I worked on two or three sections of the parkway, and I made visitations with many times with my father looking at the projects.

In other words, he built, I'm going to say, probably a half or two thirds of all the parkway in North Carolina he built.

He also built some of the Skyline Drive in Virginia up around Front Royal, down around Waynesboro and, and on down in south of that to over near Glendale Springs.

And that's just above West Jefferson.

The last section I think was built in, what, 60?

I never visited that job at one time.

Of course, that was a beautiful section that I always wondered if how much it really meant to the parkway because it was, what is it, 2,500 feet long?

And that's a whole lot of money for 2,500 feet of road.

But it's beautiful and it does what they set out to do, not to disturb the environment.

We had a camp at Mount Mitchell, and it was about six or seven two bedroom cottages, heat wire old stove in the corner.

And where we had it is now turnoff, and most of those turnoffs you see of our overlooks were one time either a shop for the equipment or we had a camp there.

Back in those last contracts we were not only doing the grading, we were doing the crush stone work and the what you and I call a asphalt row the day they were bitumen.

You took big rock and you put the raw bitumen, which is asphalt, into that, and then you sprayed it.

Then you put another coat of dust, rock dust on it.

And that's the first thing that was built in the parkway, those first rows.

And that's why they held up so good.

I don't know how many times you've been up and down the parkway, but you don't find many places of failure.

That's because it was built right to start with.

I was a timekeeper on the job at Gillespie Gap and we paid the men in cash.

That's the way the government wanted to, so they wanted to get that money circulating.

And in order to spread the money out further, we had to run two six hour shifts, which made that many more people get a job.

I used to, I can remember right now, I can see the, the time cards.

They turn them out to me and I'd fill them out and I'd send them to Durham and we always paid off a week late because with time of getting it to and from the mountains and to and from Durham and in cash especially, it took a week's time.

But I can remember the average wage that I was putting money in the envelope was $16.50 a week.

And most people never seen any money before.

That was great money to them.

That was, that was in 38.

And some of those people walked 15 miles a day to get to work.

The first thing you do is, after the government has staked it out and laid it out, it had to be a master plan.

The first thing we would do is go in there with about, oh, 50 or 60 laborers and cut the trees down in the right of way.

And of course, once you get the trees down, you got to get them out of there.

So that made that many more people work.

Then after you got the trees out, you had to put bulldozers in there and start taking the stumps out.

And we had to take all the stumps out too.

We had some stumps there that burned, the stump piles that burned three, four months.

There's so many of them in there.

And after you got the stumps out, you bring in the heavy equipment and you can move whatever you could without dynamite.

Of course, on most all the jobs it was all rock.

And you'd have another, you'd have two drill crews.

You'd have drill crew taking it down to one level and then back up behind another crew taking it down to the last level.

And you drill the rock and you shot it.

Then you'd move your, everybody might have calls them steam shovels, but by that time they were diesel shovels.

You move your shovels in and your big earth moving equipment and you'd haul it out of the cuts and start your fills.

And they got this cut down, this fill up, next cut down, this fill up.

And finally you got it to where you got to the other end and then either you started or somebody else started doing the same thing over.

Road building wasn't complicated.

I think the most complicated section we ever had was at Mount Mitchell, which is, that road went through the Asheville watershed and our men couldn't go to the bathroom and we had what we called outhouses, of course, up and down there.

And then we had a crew that we call the honey wagon.

They're the ones that went along and emptied the things out.

But I asked this man, Blue Ridge Parkway, man, who was in charge of landscaping, I said, "Why can't that man go to the bathroom?"

He was, he was a right of way man for, for the parkway place, not right of way, landscape man.

I never heard of landscaping until that got started.

But they marked every tree, and if you knocked down a tree, boy, they'd raise a cane with you.

And nobody realized it.

Everybody thinks environmentalists and other stuff is new.

They have to keep us back in the road building business 60, 70 years ago.

- The Blue Ridge Parkway, one of the most picturesque roads in the United States, offers a journey back in time, transporting visitors to an era when people lived in harmony with nature.

This magnificent road was a result of the collective efforts of numerous individuals, and it stands as a testament to preserving a significant portion of our country's natural beauty.

The Blue Ridge Parkway will continue to captivate and delight generations to come, ensuring that its timeless charm remains accessible to all.