Part 1: Blue Ridge Parkway at 75 - a road out of time

A bobcat sallied out of the woods at milepost  40 and, without looking in either direction, walked into the road in front of a car.

The driver leaned forward for a better look – “What is that?” – just as the bobcat realized that danger was rushing toward it at the top legal speed limit.

So it goes along the Blue Ridge Parkway, which is itself a little bit of wild sitting square in the path of trouble.

The road is, as its promoters like to say, more than just a highway – it’s a park with a road down the middle, a road entwined with seemingly deep forests, pastoral farmland and miles of the oldest mountains on Earth, fading away from the eye in shades of blue upon blue upon blue.

Much of this is illusion, the genius of designers who created boundless visual horizons on a park averaging only 800 feet wide.

In reality, the parkway is increasingly pressured from all sides.  The wilderness veneer is falling to development. Wetlands are being drained, wildflowers stolen. Invasive plants and pests are changing an ecosystem renowned for biological riches. Even history is not immune – parkway managers are grappling with the limited image of rural Appalachia showcased in the past.

The Blue Ridge Parkway, 75 years old this month, is as blue as a road can be.

 
“Design” is probably the single most important word in the history of the Blue Ridge Parkway.

It was designed to make work for the unemployed during the Great Depression; it was designed to connect the brand new Shenandoah and  Smoky Mountains  national parks.

The 470-mile road was designed for the new pastime of leisure motoring, and it was designed by Stanley Abbott, a young man with a degree in landscape architecture  who hired his out-of-work professors from Cornell University to help make a road that would “lay gently on the land.”

“It’s really an amazing story,” said his son, Carlton Abbott, an architect and park planner based in Williamsburg. “It’s a real adventure in natural aesthetics – the great ribbon in the sky.”

That the elder Abbott succeeded in combining beauty with function is evident in the numbers. With about  19 million tourists a year, the Blue Ridge Parkway is the most visited unit of the National Park Service, eclipsing even Yosemite and Yellowstone.

When it was proposed, the parkway was to be the longest planned road in the country. In the beginning it was called, bluntly, “America’s Scenic Highway,” but locals referred to it as simply “the Scenic.”

To consider the best route for this road, Abbott and other planners took to the skies in a Ford Tri-Motor plane. He became so airsick that he never flew again, his son said, and the rest of his planning was done from the ground.

“A stretch here along the crest, there on mountainside, along a valley stream, through the woods, along the edge of a meadow, passing a mountain farmstead,” Stanley Abbott wrote. “There were the ingredients of variety and charm.”

The route chosen was along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains through Virginia and North Carolina, although Tennessee put up a stiff political fight for its share of the road, and lost. To reach the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the parkway veered west for the last 40-odd miles of its length, traveling the Black, Pisgah and Craggy mountains into the Cherokee Indian Reservation.

The most prominent T-shirt  on sale in the visitor center at Peaks of Otter, about midway down Virginia’s 217 miles of parkway, is black with yellow printing. Instead of a blue mountain landscape or, say, flowering rhododendron, it has only words: “Do you know what a descending radius curve is? Don’t find out the hard way.”

Other objects – bandan as , key chains, ball caps – feature a distressed stick figure flying from its motorcycle on a curve . “Enjoy the view. Watch the road,” is the printed message from your friends at the park service.

They mean it. The Blue Ridge Parkway was designed by Abbott and his crew of landscape architects as a series of curves connected, infrequently, with short straight sections. Had engineers chosen the path, working for speed and traffic flow, it would have been straight and practical, with the occasional curve where it wasn’t possible to blast away or fill in a knobbly mountain.

 To preserve the shape of the mountains,  the parkway tunnels through in 26 places, making it nearly invisible from below, such as along Interstate 81, which parallels the parkway between Staunton and Roanoke. Is the parkway slower to travel? Oh, yes. Is it prettier? Infinitely.

And although the interstate highways didn’t exist when Stanley Abbott planned the parkway, his principles were followed where they intersect.

The interstates do not directly exit onto the parkway, nor vice versa. In fact, neither is really visible from the other, a neat trick by designers using sleight of sight line.

“We thought positively: Now we are coming in here amidst this natural beauty,” Abbott wrote. “We had better design and build thoughtfully, sensitively, creatively.”

Another major feature of that thoughtful design   is the aforementioned descending radius curve. To get through one, a driver must keep turning the steering wheel tighter and tighter, often while also accelerating or decelerating on a slope. It makes 45 mph, the maximum speed limit on the parkway, feel way too fast.

And the curves just keep coming, one after the other. The highway designers made it that way so the landscape would stay in front of the driver, making it possible for him to see beautiful views without taking his eyes from the road.

But the oscillating path makes it difficult to see cyclists ahead, as Roger Holn-back, executive director of the Western Virginia Land Trust, pointed out while driving  down the parkway one day.

“People are looking – it’s a pretty view – thump,” he said. “'Oh, sorry about your bike.’ They know the risks, and bikers still ride two abreast around these big sweeping curves.”

Hence, the T-shirts on sale in the visitor center.

Stanley Abbott was born in Yonkers, N.Y., in 1908,  as construction was beginning on the Bronx River Parkway . Running from the zoo to a city reservoir, the project transformed a slum of clapboard houses and a river so polluted it was killing zoo animals into a tree-lined, leisure-driving park. Abbott wanted to do the same in Appalachia.

To call him a visionary is to understate his abilities – the Blue Ridge that Abbott toured had been nearly deforested by too much logging, and soil was eroding rapidly from its flanks, but he saw the possibilities.

 The designers built erosion-control structures to break the force of rainwater while plants grew back. They introduced land conservation concepts and taught good farming practices. They created easements to maintain pastoral scenes such as haystacks and grazing cattle that were within view  but outside the narrow boundaries  of the parkway itself.

To protect more distant panoramas, they paid landowners not to develop their mountainside properties but to let the forest grow again. The result was a “borrowed landscape” – the park is only 700 to 1,000 feet wide in most locations, but its vistas run clear to the horizon, a limitless image of serenity.

“The parkway is one of the only national parks that derives its beauty through man’s hand,” Carlton Abbott said. “Yosemite stands on its own. The Grand Canyon stands on its own. The parkway reveals its beauty by how the designers showed the restored landscape.”

They succeeded so well that visitors can – and many do – view nature without ever leaving their cars. Bears, wild turkey, deer – even bobcats – obligingly cross the pavement or loiter in roadside meadows. And despite the availability of 300-plus miles of walking trails, many people view the scenery at about 275 overlooks through the windshield.

But every 30 to 60 miles is a visitor center,  wayside park or historical exhibit, designed to provide  leg-stretching stops.  Stanley Abbott called them “beads on a string; the rare gems in the necklace,” and in Virginia they include Humpback Rocks at milepost 5.8, the James River Visitor Center at milepost 63.8, the Peaks of Otter Lodge and restaurant at 86, Mabry Mill at 176,    the Blue Ridge Music Center at milepost 213.

At each stop, park buildings are patterned after traditional Appalachian sheds, barns and cabins, and painted to create the appearance of wood that has long been exposed to the elements.

Nationwide, the National Park Service stains its wooden structures brown. The Blue Ridge Parkway is unique in its weathered gray.

At least 10 types of fences – snake fences, worm fences with high riders, split-rail – are found on parkway land, few employing metal of any kind. Walls, bridges and tunnel facings are made of native stone. No edge markings are painted on the highway; no visual boundaries separate pavement from landscape. Grass shoulders encourage drivers to pull over anywhere to admire the view.

“The integrity of the ribbon of the parkway was critical, the sense of the road continuing,” Carlton Abbott said, pointing out that grass shoulders continue uninterrupted across the bridges. “Isn’t that pretty?”

It is.

The road is so pretty, in fact, and draws so many drivers that surrounding towns and counties now reap $2.3 billion a year from visitors. It was a long time coming.

Ground was broken on the parkway at Cumberland Knob, N.C., just half a mile south of the Virginia line, on Sept. 11, 1935. The road would not be completed for 52 years.

First, World War II intercepted manpower and building supplies. Gasoline shortages kept drivers off the 170 miles that were open by then, and work was slow to gear up afterward. In 1955, the federal government kick-started national park improvements with a 10-year construction blitz called Mission 66.

When it ended, only 7.5 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway  were unfinished. They would remain so for another 20 years.

Standing in the way of completion was Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina, whose owner objected again and again to construction plans that he said would destroy it. The solution was the elegant Linn Cove Viaduct, an elevated highway that skims the mountain without really touching it. In 1987, the final section was opened.

The Blue Ridge Parkway, Stanley Abbott’s masterwork, was complete.

But it was not without flaws.

Next: Buried history

Diane Tennant, (757) 446-2478, diane.tennant@pilotonline.com