CREATING SKYLINE DRIVE: SHENANDOAH'S MOUNTAINTOP ROADWAY

Skyline Drive has afforded motorists in Shenandoah National Park sweeping views of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah Valley and eastern Piedmont since its first section opened to the public in September 1934. These panoramas are a defining element of the graceful park road's naturalistic design. The drive's function as the backbone of the park's circulation system provides automobile access to the park's campgrounds, picnic areas, back-country and Appalachian Trail heads. One of the most popular recreational roads in the eastern United States, Skyline Drive is an excellent example of the National Park Service's (NPS) naturalistic road building program of the 1920s and 1930s.

The BPR supervised construction of the Skyline Drive for the NPS between 1931 and 1939. Designed with wide, sweeping, and banked curves and an easy gradient (less than 8 per-cent), the road featured a naturally compacted crushed stone base covered with a light weight mixed-in-place asphalt pavement. —Shane Wirth, HAER, 1996.

ESTABLISHING AN EASTERN NATIONAL PARK

Between the establishment of Yellowstone as the country's first national park in 1872, and the creation of the National Park service in 1916, national parks remained a phenomenon of the American West. Carved out of land in the public domain, the parks were located west of the Mississippi River, far from the country's eastern population centers. Recognizing this imbalance, the Park Service's first director, Stephen T. Mather, pushed for the creation of parks in the east. In 1919 Acadia National Park became the first eastern national park. Its remote location on the coast of Maine, however, placed it beyond the reach of most Americans.

At Mather's urging, the Secretary of the Interior appointed a committee to investigate park locations in the Southern Appalachian mountains. In December 1924, the Southern Appalachian National Park Committee recommended the Virginia Blue Ridge as its first choice for a park site, noting that it lay within a 3-hour drive of the nation's capital and within a day's drive of 40 million Americans. In 1926 Congress authorized the establishment of Shenandoah National Park (along with two sister parks, Great Smoky Mountains and Mammoth Cave).

Unlike the western national parks which were created from federal lands, Shenandoah was assembled from numerous tracts of private property. Since Congress did not appropriate funds for the acquisition of national park land, the Commonwealth of Virginia spent a decade acquiring the park's original 176,429 acres, mostly through blanket condemnation. Virginia presented the property as a gift to the U.S. Government, which approved the park in December 1935.

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