Blue Ridge Parkway: A Loving Lament

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Elizabeth Hunter, who began contributing to this magazine with its first issue and served as its award-winning columnist until her retirement at the end of 2014, also wrote dozens of articles, with care, awe and love, about many facets of the Blue Ridge Parkway. And while she still visits frequently in her own life, we consider ourselves lucky to have convinced her to make another foray on behalf of the magazine.

Mid-June, mid-week, onto the Blue Ridge Parkway at 8:45 a.m., from its intersection with U.S. 421 near Boone, North Carolina, headed north. My plan: to travel the 100 or so miles between two bridges I wrote articles about for this magazine, whose construction was necessitated by the four-laning of U.S. highways in North Carolina and Virginia. The Blue Ridge Parkway’s stone bridges are one of the iconic features that distinguish travel along its 469 miles from your ordinary driving experience. These bridges, though recent, retained the stone facing. The trip would also take me past miles of split rail fencing, distinctive stone guardwalls, and places of particular historical and cultural significance.

It wasn’t, by any means, a return after a long absence to the most visited national park in the system. I live within a half hour of the parkway, and take it whenever time allows me, on trips to Asheville or Boone, and, several times a year, to visit friends who live near Rockfish Gap at its northern terminus, in Virginia. Occasionally I make a long day trip in the other direction, to its end near Cherokee, to enjoy its most spectacular scenery. But on this particular June day I wanted to think about the parkway in the concentrated way I had during the years I was writing about it for books, newspapers and for this magazine.

A week or so before my sojourn I lunched with Gary Johnson, its chief planner and landscape architect before he retired in 2011. During the years I was writing about the parkway, he was my go-to parkway contact. He had led me to rich sources in parkway archives of information about landscape architect Stan Abbott, hired at age 25, a few years out of Cornell University, to oversee the parkway’s creation. 

During the winter of 1934, Abbott, who became the parkway’s first superintendent, had “lone-wolfed it” from Washington, D.C. down toward the Smokies in a Dodge pickup to get to know the mountains. About second superintendent Sam Weems, whose first parkway job was acquiring land for the parkway’s large recreation areas. Weems had prided himself on using persuasion rather than condemnation to turn reluctant sellers to willing ones, an approach that required a lot of front-porch sitting and making nice with resident canines wanting their ears stroked (and once, with a pet billygoat). About Ed and Lizzie Mabry, whose roadside mill, with its slowly-turning waterwheel, is probably the parkway’s most-photographed building. About “Farmer Bob” (aka “Muley Bob”) Doughton of Sparta, whose legislative skill secured passage of thrice-defeated legislation that put parkway maintenance permanently within U.S. Department of the Interior jurisdiction. 

I learned all I know about parkway design from Gary Johnson, had absorbed from him the importance of maintaining the integrity of its “historic fabric.” I knew he’d done some consulting work for the parkway since retiring. Looking back, did the battles he’d fought on behalf of parkway design still seem worth it? Absolutely. Was funding still a problem? 

He rolled his eyes. “We all love our national parks,” he said. “We just don’t want to pay for them.” 

I took my parkway trip a week after that conversation. Whenever I was writing about the parkway in the past, I’d kept the radio off, to attune myself to the parkway’s own music. The road itself is superbly engineered so that, despite its curves and ups and downs, by adhering to its 45 mph maximum speed limit, you fall easily into its rhythm, with minimal braking and accelerating. No doubt that’s partly why motorcyclists (and my Prius) love it. 

I’d chosen a sunny day. With no white lines along road edges, a design feature that fosters the illusion that the road is part of the natural scene, it can be a nightmare in foggy weather. I soon realized I’d just missed the mountain laurel bloom, and was a little too early for the Rosebay rhododendron. The spring wildflower flush was long gone. Only a stray sunbeam that highlighted the distinctive architecture of Joe-pye weed not yet in bloom hinted at the bloom season to come, when goldenrod and aster, wild sunflowers and ironweed drench parkway verges in yellow and every shade of purple. 

The parkway’s green curtain, overarched by leafy foliage, was pulled back at overlooks to reveal an agricultural patchwork beyond the downslope treetops, and a blur of blue ridges on the horizon. The overlooks were designed by Ed Abbuehl, one of Stan Abbott’s college professors, who had lost his job in the Depression, and was hired by his former student. A secretary who worked for them remembered the felicitousness of their working relationship. Abbott was a dreamer, Abbuehl a realist. “Can’t be done, Stan,” she heard Abbuehl say more than once, as Abbott spun visions of lakes and golf courses for recreation areas, the “beads on a string” that would provide visitors with the desired “ride awhile, stop awhile” parkway experience. After a pause: “Okay, Ed, we’ll do it your way.”  

Thanks to what Weems called Abbott’s “fine planning hand,” the parkway includes a superb blend of scenery and a showcase for native craft and husbandry, set off by a carefully managed roadside designed to look natural. 

“Good design implies restraint, which is creative of itself,” Abbott said. His vision for the parkway must have begun to coalesce on that first trip into the mountains. Many a winter afternoon, he needed help from “horses or mules or a chestnut rail taken from a nearby snake fence” to free his truck from the muck of a frozen road turned by the sun to jelly. He and his fellow landscape architects borrowed heavily from the creative design mountaineers employed in their homesteads. They didn’t just preserve mills, spring houses and mountain cabins; they designed parkway facilities to look like local pioneer structures. They used chestnut wood, which split easily and didn’t rot quickly, from trees killed by blight in the early decades of the 20th century, for mile upon mile of fencing. 

Part of what the parkway was designed to do—besides provide jobs for out-of-work men during the Great Depression—was create a “museum of the American countryside.” The day of my trip, the museum’s seasonal exhibit involved haying—in its modern guise. Long gone are the picturesque haystacks of historic parkway photographs. Tall grass grown heavy with seed still drooped in some fields, but elsewhere every step of the harvesting process was evident. Grass dried where it had fallen; was coaxed into windrows; rolled into bales; and hoisted onto flatbeds for hauling and storage. Mowers were at work on the parkway right-of-ways; my car filled with the rich fragrance of just-cut grass every time I passed them. I kept an eagle eye out for cyclists; for fawns not quite able to keep up with their bounding mothers; for bunnies, groundhogs and slow-moving turtles. I readied myself to hit the brakes to make way, if not for ducklings, for hen turkeys leading their excitable chicks toward greener pastures. 

And to avoid teeth-rattling drops into potholes. For there are potholes, and they’re devilishly hard to see in dappled light, of which the parkway has aplenty. Though parts of the roadway are resurfaced every year, budgetary constraints—it would take nearly a half-billion dollars to eliminate the parkway’s maintenance backlog—assure potholes’ continued presence.

I reached Doughton Park by mid-morning, and was surprised to find the visitor center closed, less so to see that the sandwich shop, where I used to stop for a hamburger or fried chicken after hiking the park’s network of trails, was padlocked. Efforts are underway to reopen the sandwich shop, built in 1949 and in operation for more than 60 years. The Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation is trying to raise a quarter million dollars to add to $350,000 appropriated last year by the North Carolina general assembly for building repairs, and $300,000 from the Appalachian Regional Commission for equipment and furniture. 

A sign told me that restrooms in the picnic area were open “after hours.” (I subsequently learned that “after hours” includes Tuesdays and Wednesdays until the season ends on Oct. 28.) There wasn’t a soul in the picnic area. For old time’s sake I drove out past the long-closed lodge, where I’d stayed a few times. It’s beautifully situated among the park’s airy upland pastures. No one was out at Wildcat Rocks where I stopped at the plaque that friends of Congressman Doughton erected in his honor, though parkway policy discouraged such efforts. Those friends must have been as mulish as Farmer Bob, because they managed to get “The Bluffs” renamed for him, also counter to parkway policy.

With the buildings at the heart of the park closed, and no one around, Doughton Park felt abandoned, though I found a few visitors making their way down to Brinegar cabin. Buckwheat bloomed and a bright patch of flax claimed pride of place in the little demonstration garden. 

From the cabin, it was another 20 miles to Cumberland Knob, where parkway construction began in September 1935, and where, 50 years later, I’d covered the 50th anniversary celebration. That event occurred on a shining fall day, and attracted a sizable crowd liberally sprinkled with politicians and parkway luminaries, past and present. A son of President Franklin Roosevelt, who had devised the make-work project that linked Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains national parks, had been in attendance. Today, parkway presence is limited to interpretive signage. Restrooms are open during the season, but sills in the shuttered visitor center are rotting; asphalt walkways are flaked and pitted; grass grows between flagstones. This kind of problem now plagues even heavily used parkway areas. A day or two before my trip, a story appeared in the Asheville Citizen headlined “Is Craggy Gardens Picnic Area Falling Apart?” An accompanying photograph showed a toppled concrete picnic table. Text mentioned rotted benches and moldy bathrooms. It’s not just the parkway that’s suffering. The maintenance backlog for the entire park system exceeds $11 billion.

This is what Gary Johnson was talking about, I thought, when he said our love for our national parks doesn’t extend to paying for them. I thought about politicians who pride themselves on “starving the beast.” Inevitably, the parkway is part of the beast they’re starving. Why would anyone bandy about an ugly metaphor like that—as a positive—talking about our government? To starve an actual beast is against the law, and an act of cruelty. 

At Cumberland Knob and Craggy Gardens, in Doughton Park’s picnic area, where fences and stiles through which the Mountains-to-Sea Trail passes are falling apart, and in countless other places, this museum of the American countryside now includes displays of our unwillingness to pay to protect our national legacy. Will we be content to let this park, created in times far more dire than our own, by men with foresight and vision, deteriorate to the point where the only solution to its lamentable shape is to privatize and sell it to the highest bidder?

It was past noon; I had miles to go even to reach my turnaround place. I crossed the state line into Virginia and drove under the beautiful double-span bridge that carries Va. 89 over the parkway and the creek that runs alongside it; past Puckett Cabin, home to a mountain midwife who successfully delivered more than a thousand babies without losing one of them, but none of whose own children survived infancy; past Groundhog Mountain picnic area, with its exhibit of the various styles of split rail fencing that parkway landscape architects discovered on mountain homesteads. 

Just north of Meadows of Dan, I crossed the four lanes of U.S. 58, and noted the grassy shoulder that continues across the bridge—a parkway signature—and how, unless you think to look left or right over the rock walls, you don’t even realize you’re on a bridge. I’d meant to turn around there, but decided to continue past Mabry Mill, a landmark where many modern day parkway visitors choose to stop awhile (that day was no exception), to the turnoff I used to take to the Parkway Housekeeping Cabins. 

The signposts for the cabins remain, though the sign itself is gone. I’d stayed in the cabins many times; since they closed, I’ve sadly missed them. Why not take a quick look at them before heading home? The entry road is gated now, but I parked in the shade of a tall, white-flowered shrub whose overwhelming sweetness was attracting mobs of bees and driving them crazy. On my way downhill, a sign warned me that bears were active in the area. It didn’t stop me. Years earlier, similar signage hadn’t dissuaded me from taking a solo loop hike from my cabin up to Rocky Knob, down to Rock Castle Gorge, through it and back up.

The cabins were still there, though empty of the quilt-covered beds I remembered, the kitchen tables and chairs, the humming refrigerators. The grass had been mowed or bush-hogged; bleached piles of it had drifted onto the pavement. There was the building that had housed the office and caretaker; there the bathhouse. There was my favorite cabin and the apple tree beside which some friends and I had fashioned an ephemeral quilt of dead leaves, mushrooms, berries, nuts and apples, the time we stayed here on a three-day writing retreat. 

The cabins were a prototype, never reproduced elsewhere, of one of Abbott’s parkway dreams: of a series of little cabin groups within a day’s walk of one another. Boy scouts and hikers could use them. He envisioned them as minimally supplied, with corn shucks to stuff into ticks, and wood to chop for campfires. Whenever I spent a night at the cabins, I always felt Stan Abbott’s presence, and that of Sam Weems, who had acquired the land they stood on for the parkway. Abbott and Weems had long since ceased to be just names to me; they were living, breathing beings whose spirits seemed to hover just beyond the lamplight. It was good to revisit that place, to remember those times, those men, their dreams, if only for a minute. 

Elizabeth Hunter on the Parkway: There’s Much More to Read

Over her many years of serving as columnist and contributing editor to Blue Ridge Country, Elizabeth Hunter contributed dozens of articles on the parkway. Here is a list of a few of them, most with connections to the accompanying piece. You can read them at BlueRidgeCountry.com/ElizabethParkway