The phrase he used for his pioneering assignment was “working on a 10-league canvas and brush of a comet’s tail.”
Photo Above: Stanley Abbott
Photo Courtesy of NPS.gov.
Stanley Abbott, just 24 when he was appointed the first landscape architect for a national first-of-its-kind project, worked at planning for a year before his work began in earnest in 1935, when the first shovel hit the ground — near the Virginia/North Carolina line — toward the creation of the Blue Ridge Parkway.
The circumstances that put the nation, the Department of Interior, the two states and thus the young man in the position to conceive, design and oversee construction of a 469-mile roadway through rugged, former private lands in western Virginia and western North Carolina are nearly impossible to imagine today. As outlined by the late Harley Jolley in his definitive “Painting with a Comet’s Tale” (1987; Blue Ridge Parkway, Appalachian Consortium, American Society of Landscape Architects), those forces were:
Connection of the nation’s second and third national parks — Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains.
The Great Depression providing a need for relief to unemployed men.
The rise of state and national leaders to that cause of relief.
The availability of talented people like Stanley Abbott for employment.
The willingness of the powers-that-were in Virginia and North Carolina to carry out the hard work of the project.
The recent completion of Shenandoah National Park’s 105-mile Skyline Drive as an exemplar that a 469-mile rural, mountain roadway could be built.
The rise of the American motorist as a force creating a desire and a need for such a thing.
And so Abbott settled into an office in Roanoke, Virginia, and spent the ensuing decade of his life creating the “managed American countryside” we drive today. He was drafted into WWII at age 43 in 1935, ending his parkway duties. Soon after his death in 1975 at age 67, the National Park Service dedicated the Peaks of Otter’s Abbott Lake, at Milepost 86, in his honor.
In this, the 90th anniversary of the beginning of his work, may we all look carefully about and admire it on our next parkway drive.
The story above first appeared in our May / June 2025 issue.
