Evicted from the 'Wild'

**This transcript comes from an earlier broadcast of this episode. There may be some changes to the audio you hear above.**

ED: We’re back with BackStory, I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. The occasion for today’s show is the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, which began the process of putting certain land off limits to all but the lightest impact visitors. But before we get to that important law, we’re going to take a few minutes to consider an earlier version of federal land conservation, and that’s the national parks.

BRIAN: A few years ago, reporter JP Dukes headed up the road to Shenandoah National Part here in Virginia to find out more about the park’s beginning. We included his story in our second episode ever. And when we sat down to produce today’s show, we thought it would be worth another listen. Here’s JP.

JP DUKES: This is maybe my 30th time visiting Shenandoah National Park. And usually when I come up here, I’m trying to remember what the world looks like without people or roads or houses. But this time I’m with a park ranger, and we’re looking for something specific.

CLAIRE COMER: Well, we’re striking out. This happens every time.

JP DUKES: The only problem is, we can’t find it. It’s not looking familiar? My guide is interpretive specialist Claire Comer, and she wants to show me a site where humans once lived.

CLAIRE COMER: Well, and I know at this particular site, there’s shoes, there’s shovels.

JP DUKES: Before it was founded in 1936, Shenandoah National Park was just an idea, one that began in 1924 when the federal government decided we needed an eastern park. Something like Yellowstone or Yosemite, but closer to where all the people lived.

CLAIRE COMER: It looks so different.

JP DUKES: Wealthy people from Washington were already visiting the Blue Ridge, most famously at Skyland Lodge. Skyland was a kind of dude ranch of East, where people could stay in rustic cabins, ride horses or hunt. Its owner George Pollock saw a national park as a way to bring more visitors to the area. And he recruited some of his friends in government and business to the cause.

CLAIRE COMER: So they filled out a nomination form, and sent that in, and this was chosen as one of the sites to look at.

JP DUKES: The federal government had a specific idea of what a park should be. In the mold of Yellowstone and Yosemite, they wanted stunning beauty, sites for fishing and hiking, and access to roads. But most importantly, they wanted it to be a wilderness, free of human settlement and development. So the Virginians fudged a little bit on their application.

CLAIRE COMER: They said that this area was pristine and free of inhabitations or developments.

JP DUKES: This, as they knew full well, was not true.

CLAIRE COMER: Now look, there’s a rock pile.

JP DUKES: And Claire has just found the proof of that.

CLAIRE COMER: And there’s the shoes, see? An old pair of boots.

JP DUKES: What we’ve found is one of some 500 home sites that existed before there ever was a Shenandoah National Park.

CLAIRE COMER: And evidently something collapsed here, maybe a chimney or something.

JP DUKES: But this one is not just any home site. This one belonged to the great grandfather of Claire Comer. He actually lived in the valley below, and he paid tenant farmers to live up here and graze his cattle.

CLAIRE COMER: And the nice thing about it is it stayed about 10 degrees cooler in summer, so the cows were much more comfortable up here.

JP DUKES: You said something about driving the cattle up. Like a cattle drive? Like drive them up into the mountains?

CLAIRE COMER: Yeah, right up Tanner’s Ridge Road.

JP DUKES: That’s amazing. So they would drive what, like 50 cattle up right up into the Blue Ridge?

CLAIRE COMER: Oh, probably way more than that.

JP DUKES: Along with the thousands of farmers and ranchers in the mountains, there was also industry. Mines, apple orchards, tan bark harvesting, lumbering. So in 1926, when the federal government OKed future park, the Virginians had a problem. What were they going to do with all these people living in the mountains?

CLAIRE COMER: Here’s a looks like an old tanning jar.

JP DUKES: It just so happens that at the same time, sociologists and anthropologists had begun to focus their attention on the people living in remote mountain communities.

NANCY PURDUE: “The hollow dweller has no ordered routine of toil. He is unafflicted by the weariness of those doing the work of the world.”

JP DUKES: This is scholar Nancy Martin Purdue, reading me an excerpt of a book called Hollow Folk, written in 1933 by journalist Thomas Henry, and sociologist Mandel Sherman.

NANCY PURDUE: “His affections are much closer to the animal level, than in the population at large. Death of loved ones does not plunge him into the depths and darkness of grief, which humanity has evolved.”

JP DUKES: The people promoting the park didn’t commission the so-called work of sociology, but they also didn’t shy away from using this image of the backward mountaineer to forward the idea that the residents of the Blue Ridge should be removed. Not just because Virginia wanted a park, but that they should be removed for their own good. The claim was that these people were devolving in the mountains, and needed to rejoin civilization.

NANCY PURDUE: “Mountain life not only does not tend to stimulate mental growth, but also acts as a handicap. The older the child, the less ambition he appears to have.”

JP DUKES: In the end, the park promoters got their way. And in 1934, the state of Virginia decided that the people living in the 200,000 acres that was slated to become Shenandoah National Park had to leave.

NANCY PURDUE: And people came in and moved them out. Burned their house down in some cases, took their things, and carted them off to some other place.

JP DUKES: So what’s left behind up in these Blue Ridge hills? Well, nature enthusiasts like me, and people working for the park like Claire Comer.

CLAIRE COMER: I want to see the people that visit the park, for the reason that it was established– they come here to hike, to recreate with their families, to feel some re-creation through the recuperative powers of nature–

JP DUKES: But that’s not all she wants them to feel.

CLAIRE COMER: I want to simply make them aware of the sacrifice. That this did not come without cost to some people.

JP DUKES: Why couldn’t you have a park that allowed people to stay?

CLAIRE COMER: Well I think you’d run into all kinds of things. If the park’s purpose is to be where you can walk through virtual wilderness and experience nature, then what choices are you going to make about what they build and how they improve their homes as time goes on? How do you museumify group of people? You don’t.

JP DUKES: Museumifying the land, on the other hand, now that’s something we can all get behind, right? It’s what the government was trying to do when it started creating national parks more than a century ago. And it’s what’s drawn me up to these mountains for years. I want to leave civilization behind, to spend time in a wild space that hasn’t been shaped by humans.

After this trip, it’s going to be a little harder to experience it that way. When I got back to my car at this enormous clearing, known as Big Meadows, I realize for the first time that it’s not a natural meadow. Claire explained that it was probably cleared by Native Americans before they were displaced. Now the park maintains the meadow pretty much as the Indians did, by mowing and burning. The hands of humans are all over this place. We just don’t let them live here anymore.

BRIAN: That’s JP Dukes. He’s a reporter in New York, currently working with a little outfit called This American Life. We’ll post some photos from his reporting in Shenandoah National Park at backstoryradio.org.