Secrets of the Blue Ridge: Lost Communities of the Blue Ridge

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Secrets of the Blue Ridge: Lost Communities of the Blue Ridge

By Phil James -January 10, 2021

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Wayside Brethren Church, at the intersection of the north fork of Moorman’s River and Black Rock Gap Road, was one of five churches that served the greater Sugar Hollow community in western Albemarle County. Courtesy of Helen Via Stogdale.

Life in these Blue Ridges, as it had been for generations upon generations, was targeted for drastic change in the 1920s when the Commonwealth of Virginia’s politicians and business interests were enticed by the siren song of tourist dollars.

Proposing a new national park for the eastern United States, the federal government’s offer pitted state against state, with a requirement that the land be gifted to the government and be devoid of residents. Such a scheme had worked fine in the west where vast expanses were still owned by the government. In the east, centuries of population growth had left no such uninhabited swaths.

When Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains were identified as a prime possibility for a new national playground, the inconvenient reality of hundreds, if not thousands, of longstanding mountain residents had to be surmounted. With the news media at their behest, and an ever-increasing public clamor for new parkland, a subtle campaign was undertaken by the Commonwealth that maligned and summarily disregarded the individual rights of its very own citizens—all under the guise of the state’s right of eminent domain.



Minnie (Garrison) Via (1883–1982), wife of Daniel C. Via (1877–1930), at home with her children on the north fork of Moormans River, western Albemarle County. Following Daniel’s death, and, later, isolation brought about by the establishment of Shenandoah NP, Minnie moved with her children to Pennsylvania and married Henry Via who earlier had relocated there from Sugar Hollow. Phil James Historical Images Collection.

Even before legal challenges to the forceful taking of these several hundred thousand acres of privately occupied lands could be heard, groundwork was begun in earnest to prepare for the masses of anticipated visitors. The most visible court challenge came from a small but determined group headed by Sugar Hollow landowner Robert H. “Bob” Via. On January 13, 1935, in the U.S. District Court at Harrisonburg, Via’s lawsuit challenging Virginia’s right to condemn and confiscate private land in order to gift it to the federal government was struck down.

Bob Via’s subsequent appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., was cut short and abruptly dismissed on the Monday before Thanksgiving in 1935. Shenandoah National Park was signed into existence one month later on the day after Christmas.

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Follow Secrets of the Blue Ridge on Facebook! Phil James invites contact from those who would share recollections and old photographs of life along the Blue Ridge Mountains of Albemarle County. You may respond to him through his website: www.SecretsoftheBlueRidge.com or at P.O. Box 88, White Hall, VA 22987. Secrets of the Blue Ridge © 2003–2021 Phil James

[underpants]

1. 👀

Interesting

[3Hotdogs]

2. The visitor's center has a couple of photos of pre-parkway life.

Still, the ride through the mountains is beautiful. I had a Black Bear cross the road in front of my car, two years ago.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

3. It's not a new story. Here's what the great Eddie Dean wrote in the Washington City Paper in 1997:

Appalachian Trail of Tears

Sixty years ago they were evicted from the Blue Ridge to make way for Shenandoah National Park. But the refugees haven't forgotten their lost mountain homes.

by EDDIE DEAN
FEBRUARY 28TH, 1997

When the men in dark suits first came to the mountains, the boy thought them exceedingly odd creatures. ... Though barely more than a tot, the boy had already seen many a stranger pass by his daddy’s farm on the east side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. After all, the 34-acre spread sloped all the way down to the meandering dirt road that cut through Swift Run Gap. Travelers used the well-worn route to make the journey between the Shenandoah Valley to the west and the rolling Virginia piedmont to the east.

It was the Depression, and many were drifters from the lowlands, looking for work and shelter and maybe a scrap of food along the way. The boy’s family would often leave bottles of fresh milk for them in the creek that trickled cold spring water below the farm. Despite the hard times, the cash-poor farm people could afford to be generous. They had cattle, horses, sheep, and turkey, along with other livestock; they had myriad vegetable gardens and orchards of apple, peach, and cherry trees. The altitude protected the crops from the bugs and blight down below.

Much of the nation was a dust bowl, but up here in the Blue Ridge -- or at least in this snug hollow between Saddleback and Hightop mountains -- the land was forgiving. ... All kinds of stragglers stopped by the farm, and no one was turned away. But the men in suits didn’t behave like most visitors, who were usually polite and gracious. These newcomers weren’t here for handouts, and they offered no greetings. Instead, they sauntered around in their city shoes all businesslike, as if they owned the place.

The boy and his siblings were curious about these silent strangers and peppered them with all sorts of questions. “We’d ask ’em, ‘What’s your name?’ You know, we were kids,” recalls Fred Collier, now a white-haired, ruddy-faced man of 71. “They’d say, ‘You don’t have a need to know.’”

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