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Shenandoah National Park
SKYLINE DRIVE
Virginia
A JOINT AGREEMENT CREATES
PARTNERSHIP
Skyline Drive was built under an interagency agreement between the National Park Service and the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR). This partnership, formalized in 1926, had been forged and perfected on western park road building projects. BPR engineers provided the technical expertise and construction management, while NPS landscape architects provided naturalistic design knowledge and exercised final review. NPS designers and engineers adapted mountain drive standards from western parks to the gentler topography of the east, coupling this with the design principles established on the suburban parkways of New York's Westchester County earlier in the century.
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"The overall idea was that motorists
should be able to drive out of Washington for a Sunday's mountain
experience and get back home by night."
—Charles E. Peterson, NPS
landscape architect
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The BPR contracted private construction firms to build the road, according to detailed plans and specifications prepared by BPR engineers and NPS landscape architects.
Most of the construction jobs were filled by local labor in accordance with Depression era federal relief programs. Some work, such as road maintenance, guard wall construction, and slope flattening, was performed by government day labor forces working for the BPR, or by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). It is estimated that more than four thousand laborers worked to construct Skyline Drive.
Popular Marys Rock Tunnel (mile 32.4) demonstrated one of the more spectacular elements of NPS and BPR mountain road building design, and prevented an unsightly scar on the mountainside. —Michael Lanning, HAER, 1996 |
Built in the midst of the Great Depression, the project was largely funded by the PWA. By 1940, the estimated cost of the drive's original 97 miles between Front Royal and Jarman Gap was over 4.5 million dollars; approximately $47,000 per mile.
| Introduction | Acadia | Blue Ridge Parkway | Colonial Parkway | Generals Highway | George Washington Memorial Parkway | Great Smoky Mountains | Mount Rainier | Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway | Shenandoah's Skyline Drive | Southwest Circle Tour | Vicksburg | Yellowstone | Yosemite | Discover History |
