Lewis Mountain, around mile 57.5, has cabins, a campstore, picnic grounds and the park's smallest campground, first-come, first-served, all seasonal. It opened in stages in 1939 and 1940 as a segregated area for Black visitors. A sign from the segregated campground and more of that history are on exhibit at Byrd Visitor Center.
Lewis Mountain's entrance is about a third of a mile on, on your right, so watch for the sign and the car behind you. A mile past it, on your left, is Bearfence Mountain. The viewpoint route is a mile and a tenth round trip, three hundred and five feet of climb, no scramble. The rock scramble is a mile and four tenths, to a view all around. Skip it if heights bother you or the rock's wet or icy. What Lewis Mountain was is in the park's own record. On November thirtieth, nineteen thirty-two, before there was a park here at all, Arno Cammerer, the Park Service's deputy director, took a typed memo about concessions in the proposed park and wrote on it by hand. Provision for colored guests. By nineteen thirty-six the written policy called for separate facilities, to the extent only as is necessary to conform with the generally accepted customs long established in Virginia. The few Black visitors who came had to eat in the staff area of the white-only restaurants, and most bathrooms, picnic sites and camping areas were off-limits to them. The Interior Secretary pushed the other way, and Pinnacles Picnic Ground was chosen as the park's first integration effort. But Lewis Mountain went ahead, and it opened in stages over the next two summers, as a separate place. Cammerer, by then the director, doubted it would even pay. Next year if it does not pay, he wrote, we can take up the question of closing it or making it available for white occupancy. In the nineteen forties the road sign for Lewis Mountain carried one more line. Negro Area. A sign from the segregated campground is on exhibit at Byrd Visitor Center. Right after the war, the Park Service ordered full desegregation of all facilities in national parks. The company running the concessions protested that it had been assured Dickey Ridge, Elkwallow, Skyland and Big Meadows would be reserved, it wrote, for the exclusive use of White people, and it threatened to give up its contract. Washington gave way, and word went out through Senator Byrd that the company could run that summer without any change. Reed Engle's history for the park says Lewis Mountain and the main dining room at Panorama were integrated in October of nineteen forty-seven, and all facilities by the summer of nineteen fifty, more than a decade before similar results elsewhere in Virginia. Other accounts give a later year, and one landscape study says it stayed segregated in practice for years after that. There's still a routed wood sign on the Drive pointing to Lewis Mountain. It's one line shorter now.