How Governor Franklin Roosevelt willed the Whiteface Veterans Memorial Highway into being in the depths of the Depression, to honor the dead of the First World War.
This road you're climbing — I want you to know where it came from, because it's a monument, and most folks drive right up it without ever knowing.
Go back to 1929. A man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the governor of New York — this is before he was President, before the whole country knew his name. And Roosevelt has an idea: to carve a road right up the side of Whiteface Mountain, all the way to the top, and to dedicate it as a memorial to the young men of New York who went off to the First World War and never came home. A living monument you could drive, up into the sky.
Now understand what it took to build it. This was the Great Depression — the hungriest, hardest years this country ever saw, men desperate for any work at all. And so they came up here, and with drills and dynamite and shovels and mule teams and their own two hands, they cut this road, switchback by switchback, out of a billion-year-old mountain of solid rock. Two thousand feet of climb, blasted and hauled and graded by hand. And that stone castle at the top — they built it out of the very rock they blasted loose, so that not one bit of the mountain went to waste.
They finished it in the mid-nineteen-thirties, and Roosevelt came back to dedicate it — only by then he wasn't governor anymore, he was the President of the United States, standing on top of his mountain road. And to this day it carries the name they gave it: the Veterans Memorial Highway. So every switchback you climbed, every foot of it, was cut by hungry men in a hard time to remember other men who gave everything. When you get to the top and take in that view, take a breath and remember what the road is for. It's not just a pretty drive. It's a thank-you, five miles long and two thousand feet high.
Photo: Tony Fischer · CC BY 2.0
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