Grandfather Mountain and the Blue Ridge Parkway: The Untold Story (new)

The longest battle over Blue Ridge Parkway land acquisition centered on acquiring land on Grandfather Mountain, NC. This issue remained unsettled from 1955 to 1968. Anne Mitchell Whisnant presents a completely fresh account of this struggle to gain this property for building the Parkway. Whisnant’s talk explores the mountain’s history, including the logging threat in the 1930s and 1940s and owner Hugh Morton's development of a popular tourist attraction there in the 1950s. She investigates Morton's claim that the National Park Service was willing to ruin the mountain by routing the Parkway higher on the mountainside than he preferred. Finally, she looks at how the conflict between the Park Service and Morton was emblematic of an emerging broader clash between privately developed tourism enterprises and federal officials managing the Blue Ridge Parkway. That clash, at its most intense in the early 1960s, represented the decline of the symbiotic relationship between private business owners and public officials that had brought the Parkway into being in the 1930s.

Super-Scenic Motorway: The Blue Ridge Parkway Nobody Knows (new)

In this program, Anne Mitchell Whisnant takes listeners on an entirely new Blue Ridge Parkway journey, one very different from the one they take when driving the road. Going beyond the concrete and immediate Parkway travel experiences such as the views, scenery, wildflowers, campgrounds, bridges, and tunnels, Whisnant delves into the complicated and often contentious processes that brought the road into being from the 1930s into the 1980s. Taking her audience past several historical scenic overlooks—Asheville, Little Switzerland, Ashe County, Cherokee, and Grandfather Mountain—Whisnant explores conflicts over land purchases, routing, Parkway access and use. In the process, audience members see how the Parkway owes its appearance at many spots to the outcomes of decision-making processes through which some people got what they wanted and others did not. The program helps the audience begin to think about how to read the Parkway landscape to see the evidence of this often hidden history.

The Blue Ridge Parkway and Landowners Large and Small (new)

This program examines the processes by which the states of NC and Virginia bought land for the Blue Ridge Parkway beginning in the 1930s. Anne Mitchell Whisnant looks at the different treatment received by different landowners and inventories the ways landowners made their feelings about the new Parkway known: through court petitions, public media, and on-the-ground opposition such as cutting down trees on Parkway lands.