1 of 4
Wildcat Rocks
The view at Wildcat Rocks. Since a meteorological tragedy in 1916, the trees have reclaimed the slopes, creating a sea of green (and fall color).
2 of 4
The Brinegar Cabin
The structure was built in 1886 by Marin Brinegar, who considered the angle of the southern sun and the level of the building (same contour as the root cellar) in creating an energy-efficient home.
3 of 4
Robert Lee Doughton
4 of 4
Wildcat Rocks
The view at Wildcat Rocks. Since a meteorological tragedy in 1916, the trees have reclaimed the slopes, creating a sea of green (and fall color).
Magic At Milepost 239: The Parkway’s midpoint offers one of its signature spots.
This magazine’s long-time and award-winning contributing editor also wrote the essays for Scott Graham’s recent coffee table book, “Blue Ridge Parkway: America’s Favorite Journey.” She takes us to her favorite spot on the 469-mile roadway.
What is it about a place that binds us to it? Doughton Park – a six-mile stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway almost exactly halfway between Rockfish Gap and the Oconaluftee River – cast its spell over me long ago. I can’t remember my first visit to the place, but its pull is tidal and strange. Part of the attraction is its drama and sheer beauty. Its airy upland pastures make graceful way for the road, as placid black and white cattle graze the greensward behind mile upon mile of weathered post-and-rail chestnut fencing. A few miles farther on, the mood changes as the parkway edges past Ice Cliffs on the backside of Bluff Mountain, a rugged promontory that broods over Basin Cove. Doughton Park claims the high ground, rising above valleys that are a patchwork of Christmas tree plantations, pastures and cornfields. It surges above this domestic tranquility in a manner both wild and captivating. Capricious weather heightens the drama. One day, ragged mists flow up over ridges to erase the road and sweep away familiar landmarks. The next afternoon puffy cumulus clouds sail high overhead, staining patches of woolly flanked mountains a darker shade of green. Something about Doughton Park suggests that any taming of this land is temporary, that it’s capable of shaking free of human grasp.
As it did in July 1916, 20 years before the coming of the parkway, when, at the end of a 24-hour deluge, huge shelving fragments of forested mountainside detached themselves and slid into Basin Cove, then a thriving community. The disaster left three dead and many homes destroyed – and prompted a mass exodus. Since then, trees have reclaimed the cove’s steep slopes. But stand at Wildcat Rocks and gaze into the sea of green, and what the eye is drawn to is one tiny atoll of a clearing, a tree at its center, a roof line just visible above the enclosing trees. The roof belongs to a one-room cabin built by cove resident Martin Caudill in 1895. The Caudills were a prolific clan. Martin’s father Harrison sired 22 sons and daughters – six by his first wife, 16 by his second. The cabin builder’s brood numbered 14. To keep his children fed and clothed, Martin Caudill raised sheep, cattle and geese, and kept 10-15 acres cleared for crops. By the time of the 1916 flood, he’d moved his growing family from the cabin (which escaped harm), to another location in the cove. His son Cornelius was one of the flood’s casualties.
This is one of the stories I know about Doughton Park. Here’s another – about Robert Lee Doughton. Doughton was born the year that Union forces at Gettysburg repulsed troops led by the Confederate general whose name he bears. Fifty years ago this fall, when Doughton was a month shy of his 90th birthday, National Park Service director Conrad Wirth unveiled a bronze plaque bearing his likeness in ceremonies near Wildcat Rocks. It was the second time the park service had bent its rules to honor Doughton. Two years earlier, it had renamed “The Bluffs” – one of the parkway’s five original recreational areas – after him.
Doughton, whose family owned some of the land that’s now part of the park, played a pivotal role in the establishment and development of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Known as “Farmer Bob” in his native Alleghany County, he was a landowner, livestock producer and country store proprietor who was nearly a half-century old when he was first elected to Congress. A Democrat, he vowed to retire from politics the first time someone ran against him in a primary.
But no one ever did. A member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1911 to 1953, he was a power in Washington, serving as chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee from 1933 to 1947 and again from 1949-53, when he retired from Congress at the age of 89. At home, he was better known for his size-15 shoes and his culinary tastes (he required apples with every meal). Even in the nation’s capital, he kept farmers’ hours: at his congressional office by 6 a.m., in bed by 7 p.m. About 20 years ago, I interviewed a woman in Alleghany’s county seat town of Sparta, who had been the telephone operator during the years Doughton was in Congress. There were only two phone lines connecting Sparta to the outside world back then, and Doughton waited in line for his turn to use them “just like everyone else,” she said, even when he was calling Harry Truman.
“He’d come over to the telephone office when he needed to make a call. After he’d talked to the president, he’d talk to me awhile before going back to his office. We didn’t really think of him as being as influential as he was at the time. To people here, he was just Farmer Bob.”
Doughton was also known as “Muley Bob,” a sobriquet he might have earned in the battles he waged on the parkway’s behalf. His was one of the voices that helped tip the scales in favor of an all-North Carolina route for the parkway south of Virginia. (Tennessee also wanted a share of the road; even parkway designer Stanley Abbott favored the route that included Tennessee.) More importantly to the parkway’s future stature, though, Doughton used every bit of his legislative expertise to ramrod a thrice-defeated bill through Congress that permanently placed parkway maintenance and jurisdiction under the U.S. Department of the Interior. Without Muley Bob, the parkway might have become just another Virginia/North Carolina road project instead of the most visited unit in the National Park System.
That may explain why the National Park Service, which has strenuously and for the most part successfully resisted renaming existing parkway features after anyone, changed the name of The Bluffs to Doughton Park in 1951. It may also explain why the NPS made a second exception to its rules when friends of Farmer Bob insisted on the installation of a memorial plaque in the park (parkway policy discourages such monuments in its scenic and scientific areas). In this they were able to over-ride recommendations by Parkway Superintendent Sam Weems, who suggested that a portrait of Doughton be hung in the park’s coffee shop, or that an account of the congressman’s career be posted at a parkway information center. Not a little mulish themselves, the friends purchased the marker – and saw to it that it went up. Doughton traveled to the park for the plaque’s unveiling, but was too ill to get out of his car.
“This doing nothing is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he declared shortly before his death on Oct. 1, 1954.
I don’t often detour to look at Muley Bob’s plaque when I’m traveling though Doughton Park, but I usually stop at Brinegar Cabin, a cultural landmark near the park’s northern boundary. Martin Brinegar, who built the cabin in 1886, died a decade before the coming of the road. His widow Caroline stayed on, and was one of a “few old timers, sentimentally attached to their ancient log cabins” who was granted a life-tenure lease on a home within the parkway’s boundary, Harley Jolly reports in his history of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Mrs. Brinegar could have lived out her final years in the two-room cabin she’d occupied for close to 50 years. But the construction activity bothered her, and she “retreated down the mountain to live out her life with relatives,” writes Richard Quin, in an exhaustive Blue Ridge Parkway Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) published by the National Park Service in 1997.
One need only think of the Caudill cabin in the sea of trees in Basin Cove to imagine how isolated the Brinegar homestead was before the parkway forever altered Caroline Brinegar’s life.
“The setting of the Brinegar Cabin and the various outbuildings reflect the remote lifestyle of a highland family,” Stanley Abbott’s son Carlton writes in “Visual Character of the Blue Ridge Parkway,” an analysis of the parkway published six years ago. He calls the layout of the farm complex “exemplary.” “Mr. Brinegar obviously considered the angle of the southern sun exposure on his cabin porch and the direction of the cold winter winds in his layout and placement of the buildings,” he writes. The homestead is built into a south-facing slope, but the mountaineer’s care in locating the cabin on the same level contour as the privy and root cellar made the farm “energy-efficient and easy to work.” Brinegar did all this “with minimum disturbance of the natural mountainside. Contemporary site planners can learn many lessons from these simple, traditional settings as they demonstrate how thoughtful building placement and use of existing natural terrain can be the foundation for good architecture, aesthetics and environmentally sensitive design.”
Parts of the farmstead are now gone (the barn was removed to make way for the parkway). But the cabin, granary, outhouse and spring house remain. The latter is tucked into the hillside below the cabin, where the clearing ends and the woods begin. An enormous white oak, sustained by the same clear water that sustained the Brinegars, spreads its generous arms above the building. I think of Caroline Brinegar stowing the butter she’s just churned in its cool, dark interior, then climbing back up the hill to set a spell on the porch, where a basket of shuck beans awaits her. The sun’s slanting; soon fireflies will rise from the grass as another day surrenders to dusky dark. Except for the hum of insects, the occasional squawk of a crow, a distant rumble of thunder, the quiet is vast and unbroken. No wonder a woman used to such silence and solitude retreated down the mountain when the work crews with their pick axes and shovels, their dynamite and blasting caps, moved in.
Since Caroline Brinegar’s departure, the Park Service has treated her cabin and its surroundings “as an interpretive landscape, not as a historic restoration,” the HAER report says. “Today the area around the cabin is carefully mown, giving the site a ‘parklike atmosphere’ that is attractive but historically inaccurate.” What is historically accurate is a small photograph on an interpretive sign mounted by the walkway down to the cabin. It shows Martin and Caroline Brinegar, dressed in their Sunday best and seated side by side, looking directly and appraisingly at the camera. Below their portraits are their birth and death dates: for Martin, 1856-1925, for Caroline, 1863-1943. They’re buried, it says, “in a tiny cemetery on a sunny knoll near the parkway campground. R.I.P.”