EDITOR'S NOTE: This story originally appeared in our our July/August 2003 issue. It is being presented again here as part of our 30th Anniversary celebration.
"Stan was a dreamer, and it took a dreamer to do the planning job he did on the Blue Ridge Parkway. The very concept of the location of [the parkway], the proportion of recreational areas along its nearly 500-mile route, the selection of…overlooks at strategic places, the location of the road itself around certain mountains and through certain gaps - this was the result of Stan's fine planning hand."
-Sam Weems, second Blue Ridge Parkway superintendent.
Photo Courtesy of the Blue Ridge Parkway
The beginnings of a beautiful park.
These Civilian Conservation Corps workers, circa 1940, loaded large trees into what would become Doughton Park, between mileposts 237 and 248.
Born March 13, 1908; died May 23, 1975, of a stroke, at age 67. These are the bookends of Stanley Abbott's life. A descendant of lighthouse keepers off the rugged coast of Newfoundland, Abbott was well-built, Hollywood-handsome, captain of the crew at Cornell University where he took his degree in landscape architecture. On the day after Christmas 1933, when National Park Service chief landscape architect Thomas Vint hired him to oversee design and construction of a parkway linking Shenandoah National Park in Virginia with Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the Tennessee/North Carolina line, Stan Abbott was a few months shy of his 26th birthday.
His first task was to get to know the mountains. Dispatched in January to "lone-wolf it" from Shenandoah to the Smokies behind the wheel of a Dodge truck, he mired down many times in mud that froze at night, then softened in the midday sun. With "horses or mules or a chestnut rail taken from a nearby snake fence," mountain farmers pulled him out. It must have been then that Stan Abbott's appreciation was born for a way of life he lovingly enshrined on the Blue Ridge Parkway. "He had an idealized vision of what Appalachia is about and it permeates the parkway," says Gary Johnson, chief of the BRP Resource Planning and Professional Services Division. "You can see it in the way we developed Humpback Rocks, Mabry Mill - a stylized landscape that romanticized Appalachian life."
Abbott's genius lay in his ability to create this idealized vision, not in a self-contained setting, but in a narrow linear park that wound through rugged mountains and settled agricultural countryside for nearly 500 miles. Most visitors are unaware that the Blue Ridge Parkway fits, not only into the landscape "as though nature had put it there," as Abbott described his goal, but into a parkway tradition whose antecedents date to 18th-century Europe. Few realize either how devastated the mountains were when Abbott first visited them. Chestnut blight had recently swept through the region, littering it with bleached corpses. Massive timber harvesting, overgrazing and poor farming practices had denuded and eroded hillsides. Those wounds - and further damage caused by parkway construction - had to be healed to create the waking dream that unfolds between Rockfish Gap and the Oconaluftee River.
"For many people, the assumption is that what you see [along the parkway] is just the way God created it. But what you're seeing is this meticulously applied landscape architecture," says Johnson, who began his N PS career with a three-year stint as a BRP construction supervisor in the mid-1970s and returned to head its planning division in 1995. "When I was here in the '70s, I drove 380 miles of the parkway every week during construction season and developed an appreciation for the sequential visual experience that Abbott and his staff created. One of the nice things about the parkway is that they thought about it in that way." The details of Abbott's plans are contained in the scrolled Parkway Land Use Maps (or PLUMs)- one for each of the 45 segments the parkway was divided into for construction purposes- stored in a corner of Johnson's office. Each rolled bundle includes multiple drawings. Landscape details down to the number of rhododendron, laurel and flame azaleas to be planted at each roadside vista- to heal construction scars and create the illusion of a natural scene- are specified on these maps.
To keep Abbott's vision intact "is the responsibility of this division," he says. Wrestling with the sometimes conflicting requirements of vista and vegetative management, and cultural and natural resource protection on parkway lands is only part of the job. Because the parkway is "a road of unlimited horizons," Johnson's staff must also try to minimize the visual impact of changing land use patterns - commercial, residential and industrial development; highway improvement projects; timber cutting; and agricultural practices - beyond parkway boundaries. "Some counties the parkway passes through require developers to run things by us, if what they're building can be seen from the parkway. It would be very helpful if they all did. Whenever we're given the chance, we meet with developers to explain our goals, so they can somewhat accommodate us," he says.
He describes the parkway's development as occurring "in three phases: creating the idea (the 1930s and '40s, when Abbott was directly involved); implementing the idea (through 1987, when construction was finished); and protecting the idea (from 1987 until the end of time). To me, the parkway's next 70 years are as important as its first 70. To protect Abbott's vision, we have to understand it through and through. That's getting harder, partly because there are only two landscape architects still working for the parkway - Al Hollister, at the Denver Service Center, and me - who were trained by people who knew Stan, who were able to talk to him directly when problems cropped up about what's the right thing to do. When Al and I retire, it all gets one step further removed. What we're trying to do now is understand, articulate and document the parkway for the future."
To begin that process, parkway officials launched two projects in the 1990s. They hired Abbott's son Carlton Abbott - whose Williamsburg, Va., architectural firm designed the parkway's headquarters building and its new Blue Ridge Music Center - to document the aspects of road and building design that give the Blue Ridge Parkway its distinctive character. The younger Abbott spent five years "on what was partly a personal adventure for me," photographing and drawing parkway buildings, fences, bridges, tunnels, walls and drainage features, and "interviewing people involved in the parkway in early years, before they passed away." The resulting 300-page "Visual Character of the Blue Ridge Parkway," published in 1997, "will help developers, road builders and people building near the parkway to understand its character," he says.
Simultaneously, Johnson and his staff began work on a "Landscape Characteristic Inventory." "Three of us spent five days driving from one end to the other, teaching the parkway to ourselves," he says. "One person drove, the other two recorded every fence, building, woodland, waterway, farm field or other adjacent land use - every visible feature, mile by mile, on both sides of the road. We knew a lot about the parkway by the end of that trip." Those two documents in hand, the parkway is now midway through development of a general management plan, a five-year project "that will really articulate the vision of the parkway. We're creating a number of sources for future parkway employees to go to, to understand what the parkway is about." The management plan will be finished in time for the parkway's 70th anniversary, in 2005.
''I'm not sure too many people could have taken on the creation of the Blue Ridge Parkway," Johnson says. "Stan Abbott was bright, articulate, visionary - a living legend. What he created didn't die with him. It's a contemporary thing - and a thing of the future. There are still landscape architects carrying out his vision. We don't do that just by praising what he did - we work at it 40 hours a week."
Father and Son
Carlton Abbott describes his father as a man who "loved characters and loved a good story." He remembers the 1940s, when Stan Abbott "was drawing plans for the Blue Ridge Parkway on his wife's old walnut dining room table in their Salem, Va. home, as "a special time, a very romantic time, as the history of life goes. On Sunday afternoons, my parents listened to the opera together on the radio. The people Dad worked with were all good friends. They dropped by the house all the time; they had spaghetti parties. Sometimes they helped me work on my little Lionel train set."
On weekends, Stan Abbott liked to take his family. "up into the mountains to visit people he'd met in his parkway work, people like Onkie Olds, who dug rhododendrons out of the woods and carried them up to the parkway to landscape it. They didn't have nurseries then, where they could buy the plants they needed. Dad told us stories about being shot at, because he drove a car that looked like the cars revenuers drove, looking for moonshine stills. And about an old man living out somewhere, whose view was going to be changed by the parkway coming through. Dad was concerned about that, so he took the plans out, to show him what was going to happen to his view. It turned out - and this would never happen today - that Dad was more worried about the view than the man was. 'That's okay,' the man told him. 'I done seen it.'"
Stan Abbott left the Blue Ridge Parkway in 1949 "because he wanted to be a landscape architect, not a park superintendent," his son says. Between then and 1963, when he retired from the park service, he worked on a number of projects all over the United States: on the Great River Road, "a wonderful project that would have followed the Mississippi River from Wisconsin to New Orleans, but never went anywhere because of the Korean War"; on the 350th anniversary of Jamestown (Carlton Abbott is now working on the upcoming 400th anniversary); on the Redwood Parkway in California and Northern Cascades National Park. Father and son went into partnership after the elder Abbott's retirement; their firm worked on state parks, museums, doing consulting work for the National Park Service. "I've continued in that work; I still run into people who knew Dad," Carlton Abbott says.
Ironically, for a man whose name is forever linked with a roadway, Stan Abbott's final battle was to prevent a road from being built through the last undeveloped stretch of oceanfront property between Virginia and North Carolina. "We'd been hired to look at False Cape State Park. The last time I saw Dad alive was at a meeting about not building a road there- and it wasn't. Dad was a simple man, never ostentatious. He didn't own a lot of things. He played a little golf, never watched TV. He was a conservationist. A woman who came to his funeral said she was a checkout person at a grocery store Dad patronized. One day, he bought only one item and she bagged it. He took it out and handed the bag back to her. 'That a twig off a tree,' he said, and that impressed her."
Carlton Abbott remembers his father standing beside a window one day, looking out, reflecting. "There'll never be another Blue Ridge Parkway," he said, meaning, probably, that the time for projects of such magnitude and vision is forever gone. Did he regret that his greatest achievement had come so early in his career? "I don't think so," Carlton Abbott says. "He was always looking on to the next thing." -EH
A Tale of 2 Bridges
"Bridges are not only the largest structures along the parkway, but they also have an important visual impact on the motorist who must go through or over them. Recognizing their visual prominence, the early parkway designers sought to give them special design attention. Consequently, the approximately 170 bridges firmly establish a major design theme in the overall character of the parkway," writes Carlton Abbott in the "Visual Character of the Blue Ridge Parkway."
As departments of transportation respond to increased traffic loads by four-laning highways that cross over or under the parkway, its historic stone bridges are increasingly threatened. Two cases in point: the bridge over U.S. 421 at Deep Gap, N.C., and the bridge over U.S. 58 at Meadows of Dan, Va. Negotiations between state highway departments and parkway officials produced two different solutions to the problem, both of which acknowledge the need to maintain the parkway's visual integrity.
In North Carolina, a single-span, segmental, arched, stone-faced bridge built in 1960 was dismantled and replaced by a new double-span bridge whose design replicates the original. "We added enhancements – stone walls and rock facing, part actual rock, part simulated - to match the theme of the parkway," says North Carolina Department of Transportation division engineer Carl McCall. "If it had been a normal bridge under a normal road, it wouldn't have had the fancy rock work." Construction of the new bridge, near mile marker 276, began in February 2000 and was completed last November. The enhancements account for $3 million to $4 million of the project's $18 million cost. "Typically, projects that cross us are more expensive," parkway resource planning chief Gary Johnson says. "This is a national park, not just a road."
At Meadows of Dan, the parkway's historic bridge over U.S. 58 (near mile marker 178) will remain intact. In a $22 million to $25 million road project that will begin this summer or fall, the Virginia Department of Transportation will reroute U.S. 58 to pass under the parkway a quarter mile north of the original bridge. Because of the way the project is being designed, "the parkway visitor won't even be aware he is crossing a major highway, or is on a bridge," says VDOT Salem District construction engineer Pete Sensabaugh. The new bridge "will be extra-wide – shoulders will be 10-12 feet wide on either side - with grass shoulder strips continuing across it," and low stone guard walls, similar to those used elsewhere along the parkway, along its perimeters. During the 12-15 months it will take to build the bridge, parkway traffic will leave the present surface of the parkway in a short arc around the construction. Access between the parkway and U.S. 58 will remain at the old bridge.