Heritage Moments
Blue Ridge Parkway
Sunday, 25 May 2008 00:03
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The Blue Ridge Parkway, stretching 469 miles between the Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains National Parks, has offered visitors breathtaking vistas, wilderness access, and a reprieve from fast-paced commercialism since the mid-1930s. It is positioned atop the rims and contours of the Blue Ridge, a mountain chain that is part of the larger Appalachian Mountains.
"Most people view highways as cold impersonal slabs of concrete built by strangers on noisy earthmoving machines. The majestic Blue Ridge Parkway...is different."
Work began on the road in September 1935, near Cumberland Knob in North Carolina, during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Originally called the “Appalachian Scenic Highway”, in 1936 the U.S. Congress formally authorized the project as the “Blue Ridge Parkway” and placed it under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service.
Though implemented during the Great Depression due to a need to create jobs, the actual idea for the Parkway dates back to an earlier generation. America in the early 20th century was worried about the effects of urbanization and industrialization on its population. Throughout the country, politicians, planners, physicians, and philanthropists worked to reintroduce the benefits of the natural world into one increasingly identified as contaminated, artificial, and unhealthy. Designer Frederick Law Olmstead was recruited to create manmade environments that would blend into their natural surroundings in places like New York’s Central Park and the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC. In fact, the term “park-way” was chosen to describe the thread of soft green that Olmstead wove through the hard iron and concrete of New York City. Thus, when it came time to plan the “Appalachian Scenic Highway” in the early 1930s, it was fitting that the folks in Washington contacted not first an engineer, but a landscape architect. Consequently, it was no surprise that the lead architect chosen, Stanley Abbott, drew his inspiration and creativity from the father of the modern American “parkway”, Frederick Olmstead.