Whose Mountain

Shenandoah exists because Virginia took this land from the people living on it. Nobody who tells this fairly gets to skip that sentence, and nobody gets to stop there either. The idea had real weight behind it. Stephen Mather, who ran the national parks, wanted one in the Appalachians. Virginia's government, its businesses and its citizens banded together to make it happen, through purchase and condemnation of private land. And the land was hurting. By the government's account, logging, farming, grazing and the chestnut blight had left a third of it bare, and the rest in brush and very young forest. In nineteen thirty-five Virginia handed over the deeds to one thousand and eighty-eight tracts. Robert Via had fought it on Fourteenth Amendment grounds, until the Supreme Court dismissed his case that November. That December, about four hundred and sixty-five families were still on the land. Some held deeds, some were tenants, and some signed up for homesteads in the valleys. Their letters are the part to hear. About three hundred survive, in the archives at Luray. Dennis Corbin wrote the superintendent in March of nineteen thirty-seven. He'd signed a permit to live at his own home until the homesteads were ready, and he told the man he was going to prune the apple trees. A man should have what he work for, he wrote. John T. Nicholson asked them to excuse his writing, because he never had the opportunity of going to school as much as one day in all his life. He wrote to a park ranger that same day, apologizing for taking the windows from his father's mountain home. I had no thought as to stealing, he wrote, and he offered to buy as many as he took. Gird Cave signed for a homestead and was turned down. You know how it would be, he wrote, to be always on a dread, not knowing what to do. Except on a few dozen properties where people were allowed to stay for life, the CCC boys had their orders, to remove all evidence of human occupation, down to the fences, gardens and orchards. Some of them told an interviewer they burned first the houses you could see from the Drive. Darwin Lambert remembered Superintendent Hoskins worrying that the neighbors around the boundary were looking for a chance to burn the place up, though Lambert said he didn't mean that in an extreme sense. In nineteen forty-five Richard Nicholson asked Senator Byrd whether a petition might get the mountain people their homes back. They'd been badly misled, he said. His daughter, Florence Morgan, said what it did to him. My daddy grieved himself to death over it. He never got over it. The graves stayed. They're all older than the road, and families have gone on burying there within living memory. Chimney monuments in the counties around the mountain carry the families' names. We want this to be an enduring reminder, said the man who started them, that these people were here. And one directive has a line about them. Someone comes to tend a family grave, pays no fee, signs a sheet at the entrance station, and drives on up.