Re-Creating the Wilderness: Shaping Narratives and Landscapes in Shenandoah National Park

Abstract

The view at Sawmill Park Overlook in Shenandoah National Park encompasses private woodlands in the distance, agricultural lands in the valley, and park forests in the foreground. An interpretive sign at the overlook describes Patchwork Forest and explains that the visible differences in vegetation occur because Non-Park areas are subject to direct human change which Park lands no longer experience. This wayside provides one short passage in a longer story told by the National Park Service (NPS) about Shenandoah, a story that has coevolved with the landscape during the last seventy-five years. This official story highlights certain aspects of Shenandoah's history and shades others, and recent expressions of the park narrative have downplayed the integral role of human beings in shaping the Blue Ridge Mountains. One does not have to stray far from Sawmill Park Overlook to find places where the landscape contradicts the narrative. At the foot of the sign are rows of tree stumps neatly cut to maintain the vista. For as long as they have been inhabited, Shenandoah National Park lands have been subject to direct human change. Homesteads, farms, cattle pastures, and orchards dotted the slopes of the Blue Ridge until the NPS took possession of the lands in 1936, and, to use the landscape architect's term, obliterated almost all traces of human history. In recent decades, the official story of Shenandoah has been one of re-creation, of a wilderness lost to human exploitation and then restored by natural processes. But nature alone did not re-create a lost wilderness. The NPS and the Civilian Conservation Corps (ccc) created a landscape never before seen oIn the BIlue Ridge, through fire suppression, road construction, wildlife protection, human removal, landscaping, and engineering. Through the various stages of acquiring park lands, establishing Shenandoah, and re-creating the landscape, park officials and supporters told a variety of stories that justified both the preservation and the transformation of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Throughout Shenandoah's history, stories and landscapes have re-created each other. This history of storytelling and land management in Shenandoah National Park attempts to make two contributions to the broader study of environmental history.