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The result is the 469-mile Blue Ridge Parkway, a paradigm of engineering and landscaping genius that winds and tunnels its way along the ridges of the highest mountains east of the Mississippi River. North Carolina boasts more than 252 of those scenic miles. From end to end, the road is one grand motion picture to be enjoyed at 45 miles per hour. Two hundred seventy overlooks stop the action for portrait-gallery compositions of Southern Appalachia. Campgrounds, picnic areas, and hiking trails complement the drive, offering motorists opportunities to explore backstage.

While the parkway was a forward-looking endeavor conceived during the Great Depression, it encompassed far more than a another needed New Deal-era make-work program for the unemployed. It envisioned a future where the once novel idea of “driving for pleasure” would be part of the American lifestyle.

The planners read their crystal ball accur-ately. Today, roughly 20 million people drive the parkway each year. They are enjoying one of America’s few national parks built entirely around a highway. In fact, the Blue Ridge Parkway is the most visited of all the parks and historic sites administered by the National Park Service.

It’s All About Location
For some years, there had been discussion of creating a scenic drive that would link the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. With the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933, which included a Public Works Administration program for building highways, the idea started coming to fruition. Building such a road would create work in the financially struggling Appalachian region and provide a never-ending stream of tourists who would spend their vacation dollars in mountain towns and communities.

Tennessee, the heir-apparent to the southern end of the parkway, was already benefiting from New Deal projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority. But politicos in Asheville were determined to grab their share of federal largess and lobbied zealously to maintain the southern section of the road in North Carolina. R. Getty Browning, the North Carolina highway engineer who proposed what became the eventual route, also challenged Tennessee’s claim to the project with a compelling argument: North Carolina had higher mountains and was, in a word, prettier.

Ultimately Harold Ickes, both Secretary of the Interior and Director of the Public Works Administration under Franklin D. Roosevelt, made the decision to place the road in North Carolina. As in Virginia, the state would purchase and donate rights-of-way, while the federal government would build and maintain the parkway under the National Park Service.
Planning started in late 1933 when engineers from the Bureau of Public Roads, state highway officials, and park service landscape architects put their heads together on where and how to lay such a highway. Heading up the park service team was Stanley Abbott, a Cornell graduate still in his 20s but already respected for his work with the Westchester Parks Commission in New York and its superbly designed system of parks and roadways.
Articulate as well as talented, Abbott knew the group had a gargantuan task before them. “We had better design and build thoughtfully, sensitively, creatively,” he said, “as we usher men and women into the presence of the natural gods.”

To the Mountaintops
The Blue Ridge is the oldest mountain chain in North America, a mass of igneous and metamorphic rock with elevations that vary from less than 1,000 feet to more than 6,000 feet. Building a road in this difficult and unforgiving terrain was a thrilling challenge and an engineer’s worst nightmare.

The first objective was to determine the parkway’s route across the mountains. Yet while the canvas was huge, highway engineers and Abbott’s designers painstakingly planned the road mile by mile, with each decision going through a process of drafts, revisions, and reviews before the first road-grader rolled in.

Construction began late in the summer of 1935. Most workers were local folk hired by private contractors or working through the Works Progress Administration. Many of the younger men were members of the Civilian Conservation Corps, living in four military-style camps established at various points along the route. It was rough living and even rougher work. While heavy equipment was used to carve out the roadbed, it took manual labor to landscape the roadsides, build trails, campgrounds, and other facilities. Yet by 1941, when work was stopped at the beginning of World War II, more than half of the parkway was complete.

An Orchestrated Illusion
“I can’t imagine a more creative job than locating the Blue Ridge Parkway,” Abbott recalled in the late 1950s, “because you worked with a 10-league canvas and a brush of a comet’s tail.”

The canvas, however, had been sadly adulterated in places. The mountains had been lived in for more than a century. Not all views were aesthetically appealing. Clear-cutting by timber companies had scarred many peaks. Thus the job was not only one of beautifying an already spectacular landscape, but one of healing where it had been hurt. Where rehabilitation was necessary, new trees and flora were planted.

The whole idea was to create, in Abbott’s words, a “museum of managed countryside,” which presented the mountains in their original unspoiled wildness. Like good cinema-tographers, the planners edited the landscape, cutting out what was visually unappealing and splicing in the picturesque and the rustic.

Parkway designers struggled with the best way to tell the “pioneer” story. In some places, contemporary looking clapboard houses were razed and replaced with log cabins. In others, designers took the simple expedient of routing the parkway away from communities and towns that looked too modern or commonplace.

The landscape architects called on two great muses. They incorporated the aesthetics of 19th-century designers Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, creator of the controlled natural setting of New York’s Central Park and the grounds at Asheville’s Biltmore Estate. Overlooks were sited to create living canvases of the mountain views, reminiscent of the monumental paintings of the Hudson River School. Hundreds of park service interpretive signs were designed to be easily read from inside an automobile. All of this had to be in sync with the strict guidelines of the National Park Service and the physics of building a road in such a rugged environment. The designers did their job so well that, today, it is difficult to see where the purposeful landscaping ends and natural terrain begins.

Rock Solid
Much of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina is solid rock. This means that sometimes the only way to get across a mountain is to go through it. The result is an astounding 25 tunnels in the North Carolina section of the parkway (compared with one in Virginia), with lengths ranging from the 150-feet Rough Ridge Tunnel at Milepost 349 to the 1,434-feet Pine Mountain Tunnel at Milepost 399.

Digging these tunnels was gritty work, a laborious job of excavating, drilling, blasting, and clearing boulders by hand. A truck-mounted, water-cooled, compressed-air drill called a Jumbo bored holes in the substrata before dynamite was used to break up the rock. To prevent cave-ins, the tunnels were lined with concrete. Local and European masons then faced the tunnel entrances with stone laid in rough and irregular patterns to give the facades a natural character. The passages mold to the mountains so unobtrusively that driving into them gives the impression of entering a cave.

Though it was roughly 50 years before Linn Cove Viaduct—the final piece of the roadway—was completed, the designers of the parkway succeeded beyond their wildest hopes. The canvas they painted with the comet’s tail brush now brings millions of visitors through Western North Carolina year after year. The American Society of Landscape Architects and the American Society of Civil Engineers have bestowed landmark status on the byway. Building the scenic route took brains, brawn, remarkable ingenuity, and a never-ending awareness of the natural world it aimed to present. They created a roadway that lies gently upon the ridges, blending with the spruce and rhododendron. And most impressive, they brought mere mortals to the mountaintops.