![]() ![]() Although the Parkway differs from the usual national park in its narrow land-holdings (at times shrinking to a width of only 200 feet), it is still managed like any site in the National Park Service. After much wrangling in Congress over acquisition, funding, and the location of the road, it was decided that the Parkway should follow the crest of the southern Appalachian mountains through Virginia and North Carolina, and that the necessary rights-of-way should be purchased by the states and then turned over to the federal government to be administered by the National Park Service as a park. Liking what he saw, he soon approved the concept of constructing a scenic motor way linking the two new parks, Shenandoah and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Roosevelt had visited Virginia’s first Civilian Conservation Corps camp while they were working on the Skyline Drive through Shenandoah National Park. A Scenic Motor RoadĪctual construction of the Parkway didn’t begin until late in 1935, although the plan had been in the works for the two years prior. The recent openings of two popular eastern parks, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Shenandoah National Park, were already attracting tourists to the naturally beautiful but financially poor area, and the increasing availability of the automobile foresaw a new generation of motoring vacations. ![]() ![]() Trained engineers, architects, and landscape architects were left unemployed by the Great Depression, and thousands of mountain families were verging on poverty. The idea resulted from a combination of many factors, the primary one being that jobs were needed. The Blue Ridge Parkway was born at a time in American history when social change was at the forefront of political events. Stanley Abbott, Chief Landscape Architect for the Parkway “The idea is to fit the Parkway into the mountains as if nature has put it there.” ![]()
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