Blue Ridge Parkway

The Blue Ridge Parkway is the longest roadway in the U. S. that was planned as a single unit. Its origin is connected to government efforts to provide relief from the Great Depression, and conservation of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 0:37Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:09Speaker 03

  In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military.

• 1:32Holly Frey?

  We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 2:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:19Holly Frey?

  And I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's time for the episode on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

• 2:23Holly Frey?

  Whee.

• 2:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  That was inspired by my recent trip to Asheville and a historical display that I saw outside the Folk Arts Center at mile marker 382. When I saw that display, I thought, hey, maybe we should do an episode on the Blue Ridge Parkway. And then some very cursory research turned that into it should have an introduction on Skyline Drive. And then the rest of the episode will be on the Blue Ridge Parkway. And then during the note taking, Skyline Drive grew into its whole episode by itself, which came out on Monday. I think we said last time, this isn't really a two parter. There are some connections between the Blue Ridge Parkway and Skyline Drive, including that they are physically connected at Rockfish Gap in Virginia.

• 3:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Blue Ridge Parkway is 469 miles long, making it the longest linear park in the United States and the longest roadway that was planned as a single unit. Like Skyline Drive, its creation was deeply connected to the federal government's efforts to provide relief from the Great Depression and to conserve the landscape and the views of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

• 3:36Holly Frey?

  The Blue Ridge Parkway was planned as a road that would stretch from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the border of North Carolina and Tennessee. As we talked about on Monday, the Southern Appalachian National Park Committee recommended the creation of both of these parks in 1924. And President Calvin Coolidge signed their creation into law on May 22, 1926. But there was actually a similar road planned through the Blue Ridge Mountains before that, a scenic toll road that would run from Marion, Virginia to Tallulah, Georgia.

• 4:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  This was proposed in 1906 by North Carolina state geologist Joseph Hyde Pratt, who was also a member of the Commission of the Appalachian Forestry Reserve. Pratt secured a charter for a company to build the road, and construction on the first stretch of it started in 1914. But then, World War I officially started in June of that year, and that put an end to that construction. The construction did not restart once the war was over. A very short stretch of today's Blue Ridge Parkway follows Pratt's proposed route. It is just a couple of miles in North Carolina, a little bit south of Linville Falls.

• 4:52Holly Frey?

  Discussions of a highway through the Blue Ridge Mountains resumed in 1928, two years after Congress authorized the establishment of Shenandoah, Great Smoky Mountains, and Mammoth Cave National Parks. The Eastern National Park-to-Park Highway Association, led by Representative Maurice H. Thatcher of Kentucky, started advocating for a highway that would link all of those parks together.

• 5:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  So this was inspired not just by the creation of those parks, but also by the National Park-to-Park Highway, which connected 12 national parks in the western United States, including Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Mount Rainier. The National Park-to-Park Highway was a loop more than 5,000 miles long that traveled through 11 states. It had been built to help promote travel to the parks and also out of necessity. The federal government had established a collection of national parks, and they were really known for their uniqueness and their beauty. But there also just wasn't much infrastructure that would allow people to actually visit them,

• 6:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  or much in the way of maps for the roads that did exist. This became a bigger need as cars became more popular, more affordable, and more available. At that point, sort of the popularity of cars had outpaced the establishment of improved roads to handle them.

• 6:20Holly Frey?

  While the National Park to Park Highway existed, it was pretty rugged. Most of it was not even paved. One group of people departed Denver, Colorado on August 26, 1920, the day after the highway was dedicated to travel the whole route. And they stopped for lunches, dinners, and speaking engagements, and then they spent the night somewhere every night. And this little road trip took them 76 days.

• 6:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  So the idea of an eastern National Park to Park Highway got some support, including from the National Park Service and the Bureau of Public Roads, which later became the Federal Highway Administration. The idea for the eastern highway was that it would build on established roads and highways. It would improve ones that already existed and create new ones where they did not exist. This proposed park-to-park highway would travel through beautiful parts of the country, but it was also meant to be a regular highway, open for recreation and for commercial traffic.

• 7:25Holly Frey?

  The Great Depression started just a year after the Eastern National Park to Park Highway Association started advocating for this, which meant very little progress was made on actually building it. And then things went in a different direction. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited Civilian Conservation Corps camps in Shenandoah National Park. So as a recap, the CCC was a work-relief program that was part of Roosevelt's New Deal, and it was generally focused on projects related to natural resources. During that visit, Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia suggested that a new road could be built through the Blue Ridge Mountains, similar to Skyline Drive that was in the process of being built through Shenandoah National Park.

• 8:10Holly Frey?

  And that road would connect Shenandoah to Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

• 8:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  This would be a little bit different from the proposed Eastern National Park-to-Park Highway. Byrd did not pitch the idea of connecting all three of the parks, just Shenandoah and the Smokies, although there were some various proposals to extend the southern end of this scenic road into Georgia. And it also would not be a regular highway. It would be a limited-access road with no commercial traffic.

• 8:42Holly Frey?

  In June of 1933, Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act, which was another part of the New Deal. This act did a lot. It suspended various antitrust laws and instead encouraged businesses to collaborate with one another and to create codes of fair competition that would establish industry-wide standards for things like wages, prices, and consumer protections. It also protected workers' rights to form unions and collectively bargain. Title II of the Act was focused on public works and construction projects, and it said in part, quote, "Not less than $50 million of the amount made available by this act

• 9:24Holly Frey?

  shall be allotted for (a) national forest highways, (b) national forest roads, trails, bridges, and related projects, (c) national park roads and trails in national parks approved or authorized." That $50 million was part of a $3.3 billion federal public works program.

• 9:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  On November 24, 1933, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes approved the construction of a parkway connecting Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains National Parks as a public works project. The following month, $4 million was allotted for the construction. The Federal Highway Act of 1934 also included language about increasing employment by allocating money for road construction, including, quote, "survey construction, reconstruction, and maintenance of highways, roads, trails, bridges, and related projects in national parks and monuments and national forests."

• 10:23Holly Frey?

  The next step was to plan a route. The easier part was the northern end in Virginia, since the road was supposed to connect to Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park. But since Great Smoky Mountains National Park is on the border between North Carolina and Tennessee, the southern end of the road could approach it through either of those states. Although, there were plenty of critics of this project. Overall, both states were extremely eager to be home to the southern end of the Parkway, since the construction would bring jobs to the area and the finished Parkway would be a source of tourism dollars. This region had been economically depressed even before the start of the Great Depression, and the Depression had made that situation much worse.

• 11:08Holly Frey?

  So there was a huge need for relief, whichever way the Parkway went.

• 11:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  This led to almost a year of debate, with both Tennessee and North Carolina laying out reasons for why their route was the better one. As examples, the Tennessee route left the mountains and proceeded along rivers at lower elevations. So there was an argument that people might get tired of the mountain driving and like that change of scenery. But the proposed North Carolina route stayed in the mountains, and it was a lot more rugged, including the highest elevations that the Parkway would pass through. So advocates for the North Carolina route suggested that people would appreciate those cooler, higher elevations during the hot summers, rather than having to come down out of the mountains

• 11:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  and drive through humid valleys along the river. One of the supporters of the North Carolina route was R. Getty Browning. That's an engineer who had scoped out the proposed route himself on foot. Landscape architect Stanley William Abbott favored the Virginia route. Both of these men were very deeply involved with the creation of the Parkway.

• 12:19Holly Frey?

  Secretary Ickes appointed a committee chaired by Maryland Senator George Radcliffe, and the first hearings were held on February 6, 1934. The Radcliffe Committee recommended the Tennessee route, but rather than going with that recommendation, Ickes approved only the portion that was the same for both of the plans. This led to another round of extensive lobbying by both sides and a second set of hearings.

• 12:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  The North Carolina route was finally approved on November 10, 1934. One of the arguments for going with the North Carolina route was that Tennessee was already getting federal relief and support through the Tennessee Valley Authority, which had been established the year before. A decade after all of this, Tennessee also got approval for its own parkway, the Foothills Parkway alongside Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Although today, more than 80 years later, only part of that parkway is complete and opened to the public.

• 13:22Holly Frey?

  We'll talk about what it took to get the land to build the parkway after we pause for a sponsor break.

• 13:31Speaker 04

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 13:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hey, everybody. It's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.

• 13:54Speaker 04

  It was going to rival anything that was already built, and that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.

• 14:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  That includes Field Services Manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.

• 14:08Speaker 05

  Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.

• 14:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.

• 14:18Speaker 05

  To actually see the whole stadium light up and data is flowing is a beautiful thing.

• 14:22Speaker 04

  What the fans experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.

• 14:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  AT&T, connecting fans to what they love. Connecting changes everything.

• 14:30Speaker 03

  In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military.

• 14:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  So, you're considering getting a home security system, but you want something that fits your space. Well, with ADT Blue, it's easy to customize a system that's right for you and set it up yourself. Just pick the kit and monitoring plan that makes sense for your home. Let's say you're worried about package theft. The ADT Plus app can walk you through setting up a new doorbell camera kit. Once it's installed, ADT Pros can help you keep tabs on it 24/7, or you can manage it yourself from the ADT Plus app. There are no long-term contracts, so you can change your monitoring plan whenever you want. The flexibility doesn't end there. You can add to your system as you need to with things like extra cameras or motion sensors.

• 15:35Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:58Holly Frey?

  We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks

• 16:40Holly Frey?

  To doctors, influencers and real people trying these trends. Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Help Versus Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 17:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  As was the case with Skyline Drive, the road from Shenandoah National Park to Great Smoky Mountains National Park was supposed to be scenic. It was initially called the Appalachian Scenic Highway, and in the early stages of the planning and building, locals mostly just called it the scenic. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed legislation formally establishing it as the Blue Ridge Parkway to be administered and maintained by the Secretary of the Interior through the National Park Service on June 30th, 1936. By that point, the construction had been going on for about a year.

• 17:47Holly Frey?

  Long before that, even before the route was approved, the Parkway was being described not just as a road, but as an elongated park with a much wider right of way than a typical road. The right of way is the land that a road rests on or is planned to be built on, along with the land on either side that is owned and maintained by a government entity. Exactly how much land is needed depends on the type of road. Like, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, a four-lane divided highway today needs a right of way of 150 to 300 feet. That's about 45 to 91 meters or more. In the 1930s, the right of way for a two-lane road was often more like 50 to 75 feet, or

• 18:32Holly Frey?

  15 to 22 meters. But the plans for this Parkway started out with a plan of a very ambitious 1,000 feet or more than 300 meters to allow for more control of the area around the road and its landscape.

• 18:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  That thousand-foot right-of-way turned out to be enormously impractical and really expensive. So, in practice, as the governments of North Carolina and Virginia got to work acquiring all this land, they settled on rights-of-way as narrow as 200 feet in some places, but more like 800 feet in others. Scenic easements were also obtained from property owners adjacent to the parkway. These easements barred, quote, "unsightly or offensive materials," such as sawdust, ashes, trash, or junk, as well as things like billboards and other commercial signs in sight of the parkway. Sometimes, land that the government acquired was also leased back to the landowners,

• 19:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  provided that they could follow those standards for keeping things scenic.

• 19:39Holly Frey?

  Just like with Shenandoah National Park, the process for obtaining the land was handled by the states, with the land then being transferred to the federal government. We talked about Virginia's process on Monday. It had passed a blanket condemnation law that allowed for one condemnation notice to cover an entire county, and then the Commonwealth could buy those condemned properties under eminent domain. Virginia would transfer the land to the federal government once a price had been agreed upon to compensate the landowner.

• 20:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  In North Carolina, a map of the affected properties was posted at each county courthouse, and as soon as that map was posted, the property was considered to belong to the state. The state could immediately transfer it to the federal government and then negotiate a price with the landowner afterward. People typically already knew that this was coming before the maps were posted, and they were also generally allowed to keep living on and using their lands temporarily while the negotiations were going on to settle on a price.

• 20:44Holly Frey?

  In both states, this was a confusing and frustrating process, full of inconsistencies and contradictory information, and people who were furious about being forced off their land, understandably. There were so many issues tracing back to people being allowed to stay temporarily in North Carolina that in 1937, the National Park Service recommended that no more land be transferred until the people living on it had been evicted. Virginia's policy of agreeing on a price before transferring the land meant that it took a lot longer to get the land to the federal government. But in North Carolina, actually getting compensation for land that had already been transferred became truly arduous.

• 21:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  This could also have a huge impact on people who were losing only a small part of their land. Like if the Parkway route cut through the middle of somebody's farm, it wasn't just that now there would be a road through the farm. It would be a road that the farmer could not connect a driveway to or use for commercial purposes. They might not even be able to cross that road easily.

• 21:52Holly Frey?

  Most of the people who were affected by this were small, individual landowners. According to federal data, most of the small farms in the region were earning only about $86 per year. So part of the thought process was that these families would ultimately be a lot better off, thanks to the tourism that the Parkway would bring in. But that didn't really make it easier for people who didn't want to lose their homes and farms, especially since many of them had been on that land for generations.

• 22:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  Generally speaking, people who had more money and resources and political connections were able to get more money for their land, and in some cases, get it a lot faster. But there were also some wealthier landowners who got into really high-profile, multi-year disputes over the Parkway. One was Harriet Clarkson, who had helped found the resort town of Little Switzerland, North Carolina. Among other things, he was a justice on the North Carolina Supreme Court. He was also a white supremacist, and deeds in Little Switzerland included racially restrictive covenants allowing their sale only to white people.

• 23:01Holly Frey?

  Clarkson argued that the Parkway was going to wreck Little Switzerland, and he filed suit after the state seized some of his land. This case made its way to the state Supreme Court where Clarkson had to recuse himself. That left the court split three to three, effectively upholding an earlier decision, which meant that Clarkson got $25,000 for his land, plus the Parkway's narrowest right-of-way through Little Switzerland, plus multiple entrances to the Parkway for the resort. By the time things were settled, the dispute had gone on for three years. The Parkway did turn out to be an economic boon for Little Switzerland, but Clarkson died in 1942 without seeing that benefit play out.

• 23:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  Construction of the Parkway took a very long time, something that we will be getting back to in a bit. And one of the other big disputes started much later in the process. So in the 1930s, Hugh Morton's grandfather, Donald, had negotiated a right-of-way at a lower elevation on land that he owned near Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina, and that land was open to tourists. Once the work on the Parkway actually got started, though, the government started looking at a higher elevation route around Grandfather Mountain instead. Eventually, Morton's grandfather died, and then after World War II, Morton took control of the family business. He developed that property into a much bigger tourist

• 24:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  attraction with a road up to the top of Grandfather Mountain and a mile-high swinging bridge, which if you grew up in North Carolina during a certain era, you surely saw ads for. This was a suspension bridge that went across an 80-foot chasm on the property.

• 24:49Holly Frey?

  No, thank you. Morton is often framed as a conservationist who is fighting to save the mountain. He liked to say that the Parkway was taking a switchblade to the Mona Lisa, and he did do a lot of conservation work at Grandfather Mountain. But he also built a road to the top of it. A big part of this dispute was really about how the parkway would affect his growing tourist attraction. He had the support of various high-ranking political figures, including a series of North Carolina governors and other wealthy people. So this dispute went on for more than 40 years. Ultimately, Morton and the National Park Service did reach an agreement involving

• 25:31Holly Frey?

  a middle route between the lower and higher elevation routes, but this stretch of the parkway was the last to be built, and it didn't happen until the 1980s. We're going to come back to that in just a bit.

• 25:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  The last prolonged dispute we're going to talk about was actually the first one that happened chronologically, and it involved the state of North Carolina, the federal government, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. The Cherokee's historical homeland spanned much of the southeastern United States in and around the southern Appalachian Mountains. Many of the Cherokee had been forced out of this territory in the 19th century, including during the massive removal that became known as the Trail of Tears. We talked about this more in our Georgia Gold Rush episode, which came out on August 27th of 2018.

• 26:21Holly Frey?

  Some of the Cherokee resisted this relocation, and others later returned to the mountains from what's now Oklahoma. Today, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is the only federally-recognized tribe in North Carolina with about 15,000 enrolled members. The Eastern Band's home in western North Carolina is the Qualla Boundary, which is often described as a reservation. It is not land that the federal government set aside as a reservation for the Cherokee, though. It's land that the Cherokee purchased for themselves in the later part of the 19th century, which is under a protective trust from the federal government. Enrolled members have the right to buy, sell, and own the land.

• 27:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  So the parkway planners wanted to acquire 15 miles of right-of-way across the Qualla Boundary, near the southern end of the parkway route. But the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is a federally-recognized tribe and a sovereign indigenous nation. This was also happening after the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, also called the Indian New Deal, which had shifted the federal government's policy toward indigenous people as one of tribal sovereignty and indigenous self-determination.

• 27:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  There were multiple laws and federal policies and agencies involved with this, which meant that the state of North Carolina could not just condemn this land and acquire it under eminent domain the way that it could with non-indigenous landowners outside the Quella boundary.

• 27:52Holly Frey?

  This conflict had so many layers. The Cherokee in North Carolina were organized and politically savvy, but they had also already been struggling economically before the start of the Great Depression. And the Great Depression had, of course, worsened the situation. Most of the land in the Quella boundary was not arable farmland, so much of the tribe's income had been coming from timber. But the timber industry had collapsed in the wake of the Depression. The 15 miles of right-of-way that were wanted for the Parkway included some of the tribe's limited amount of arable land.

• 28:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  There were also a lot of other questions about what the Parkway would mean for the Cherokee. Like, what was most important? The land that the Cherokee had secured for themselves in the face of colonization and removal and genocide? Or was it the agricultural products that could come from that land which people needed? Or was the tourism that the Parkway could potentially bring, was that the most important? If the Parkway passed through part of the Quella boundary, what would the expectations be for the Cherokee living near it or for the Cherokee elsewhere in the Quella boundary? There were very real and reasonable fears that the Parkway could turn Cherokee into

• 29:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  basically a human zoo with non-indigenous tourists expecting to see people in what they imagined was a Cherokee way of life. There were some similar concerns for the rest of the Parkway as well, about whether tourists would be expecting to see stereotypical hillbillies, but this, of course, had some additional nuances for the Cherokee.

• 29:32Holly Frey?

  That was also connected to questions and differing opinions among the Cherokee about what was best for them as a people. And these are questions that had been ongoing since Europeans had started colonizing the region. Was it better to try to assimilate or to maintain Cherokee culture and identity as much as possible? Or perhaps some combination of both?

• 29:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1935, the Cherokee approved a right-of-way across part of the Quala Boundary, but then they rescinded that approval after it became clear that the proposed route was going to take more arable land than had been anticipated. That led to a proposal for a land swap, giving the Cherokee arable land that was already part of Great Smoky Mountains National Park in exchange for that right-of-way. Principal Chief Jarrett Blythe had been opposed to the initial route through the Quala Boundary, but was open to finding some kind of compromise. But a vocal opposition had also developed within the tribe, and one of the most outspoken opponents to the parkway was Vice Chief Fred Bauer.

• 30:40Holly Frey?

  This dispute went on for more than three years, and by 1939, the Department of the Interior was starting to explore whether there was a way to seize the land under eminent domain. The state of North Carolina started working on a bill that would allow for this.

• 30:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  All of these issues became part of the Cherokee Tribal Election in 1939. In that election, Blythe was overwhelmingly re-elected as Principal Chief, and Bauer and some of his supporters were voted out. Afterward, the Cherokee Tribal Council voted in support of a new plan: a higher elevation ridge route for the parkway that would not impact the tribe's arable land. This was contingent upon financial compensation for that right-of-way, as well as a commitment from the federal government to build a regular highway to the Quala Boundary to give the Cherokee better access to the rest of the region and beyond.

• 31:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  All of this was settled in 1941. The Cherokee were paid $40,000 for that right of way, and the federal government later built a stretch of US Highway 19 through the Cherokee area.

• 31:51Holly Frey?

  In addition to all of this, the Blue Ridge Parkway was intended to be a linear park, connecting a string of larger parks with campgrounds, picnic areas, trails, and other amenities along it. Some of those larger parks were built, but not all the ones that were part of the original plan. Land for recreation areas beyond the right of way for the road was acquired through the Depression-era Relief Agency called the Resettlement Administration, through private donations and through transfers of land already controlled by the US Forest Service. Several parks along the Parkway were also privately donated, including Moses H. Cone Memorial Park and Julian Price Memorial Park in Blowing Rock, North Carolina.

• 32:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  We will get to the actual building of the Parkway after another sponsor break.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military.

• 33:09Holly Frey?

  We've all done it. Tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, And real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, not to hype them more,

• 33:53Holly Frey?

  but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 34:12Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 34:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  find people who can help drive results. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. Get your $75 sponsored job credit today at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 35:24Speaker 06

  Live Right, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Seitz proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.

• 35:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  We mentioned two of the people who were heavily involved in the design of the Blue Ridge Parkway earlier, Stanley L. Abbott and R. Getty Browning. Browning was a federal parkway engineer whose maps of the area and the suggested route became a big part of the parkway planning. Abbott was named resident landscape architect and the acting superintendent of the parkway in early 1937. Abbott took some inspiration from Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park, which was also one of the general inspirations for the Blue Ridge Parkway. He also took inspiration from the work of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who is sometimes called the "father of American landscape architecture."

• 36:42Holly Frey?

  Abbott and the other landscape architects who worked on the parkway described wanting to fit the road into the mountains as if nature had put it there. From above, it would look like a ribbon curving through the landscape. This also applied to the view from the road. He was a big proponent of the scenic easements that we mentioned earlier.

• 37:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  Abbott also developed a visual approach to the parkway that emphasized preserving and conserving the land and its history, while also keeping a managed landscape in mind for the future. Sort of like, uh, Skyline Drive. This is a thing where you look out from the parkway and it looks like it has always been that way and is its natural state, but it's really a managed view that people are seeing. The construction also had a lot of similarities to Skyline Drive, including using local stone for bridges and tunnels, and focusing on native plants in view of the parkway. Lots of other roads cross under the parkway, and these bridges for the parkway were often

• 37:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  built from local stone with a very similar rustic look.

• 37:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  This also applied to things like retaining walls, bridges, and tunnels to be built along the parkway itself.

• 37:56Holly Frey?

  Forty-five different construction units were involved in building the parkway in the late 1930s. As was the case with Skyline Drive, private contractors were involved, but much of the labor was paid for by Depression-era relief programs, including the Works Progress Administration, the Emergency Relief Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps. There were four CCC units that worked on the parkway, and one of them, the Galax, Virginia camp, was for black men. The CCC didn't build the road itself, but was focused on things like overlooks and amenities, as well as grading slopes and planting trees and other plants.

• 38:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  While Skyline Drive and Shenandoah National Park were both open by the late 1930s, the Blue Ridge Parkway was a lot longer and a lot more complex. A stretch of about 20 miles in North Carolina near the Virginia border was open and ready for travel by 1939. And by the time the United States became involved in World War II, about 150 miles were complete, and the first concessions had opened to the public. Like Shenandoah National Park, there wasn't an overall racial segregation policy for the park, but the initial plans had involved the construction of segregated facilities. Only some of those facilities had been built by the time the war started.

• 39:20Holly Frey?

  New construction work on the parkway had been suspended entirely during the war, and three camps of conscientious objectors from the civilian public service worked to maintain what was already done or in progress. Most of the sections that had opened were not widely used during the war due to shortages of rubber and fuel, and a ban on driving for leisure.

• 39:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  When construction resumed after the war, it was without building any new segregated facilities. But the Parkway did still exist within the racial attitudes of the areas that it was passing through. To be clear, though, those communities were not exclusively white. The Parkway passes through areas that are home to Melungians, which are a multiracial ethnic group in the Appalachian Mountains. That's a term that started out as a slur, but was later reclaimed. The Parkway also passed through a number of Black communities, some of them dating back to before the Civil War. And some of the land that was acquired for the Parkway was acquired from Black families, including the Saunders family, who had a farm near Peaks of Otter, Virginia,

• 40:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  which they sold to the government in 1942. There's also a cemetery at Meadows of Dan Baptist Church at mile post 177 that's believed to be a slave cemetery.

• 40:36Holly Frey?

  We also talked about the southern end of the Parkway running through Cherokee lands in the Quala Boundary earlier in the episode. After the war, construction on the Parkway was also a lot slower. There was no longer the same sense of urgency about job creation that had propelled the earlier work on the Parkway. And most of the Depression-era relief programs that had been paying for labor had already ended.

• 41:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1956, the National Park Service launched a 10-year project called Mission 66, which was a plan to expand the Park Service, handle a lot of badly needed maintenance, and finish projects that had been languishing, including the Blue Ridge Parkway, which still was not done. And by the end of Mission 66, only 7.7 miles of the Parkway were still unfinished.

• 41:27Holly Frey?

  That last 7.7 miles included the stretch around Grandfather Mountain, which we mentioned before the break as being in dispute for decades. The National Park Service and Hugh Morton finally reached an agreement in the 1970s. A lot of the descriptions of this agreement make it sound as though Morton's approval required the National Park Service to build a viaduct around the side of the Grandfather Mountain to protect the ecosystem. But a viaduct had really been part of the plan since Parkway planners had decided to pursue a higher elevation route than the one that Morton's grandfather had originally approved.

• 42:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Lenkov viaduct around Grandfather Mountain was, for the time, an engineering marvel. It's made of 153 precast concrete segments, each of them unique. They are held up by piers that were cast on-site. The bridge itself was the only approach to the construction site, and heavy machinery would have damaged the landscape. So, all of the work was done from above, with equipment being brought in by helicopter and the segments placed one at a time by a crane that moved along the viaduct as it was building it. This 1,250-foot viaduct was finished in 1983 and cost almost $10 million,

• 42:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  and it earned eight different professional awards, including the 1984 Presidential Award for Design Excellence. Side note: Hugh Morton died in 2006, and two years later, the Morton family sold part of their land to the state of North Carolina. It is now Grandfather Mountain State Park.

• 43:07Holly Frey?

  The roadways connecting the viaduct to the rest of the parkway on either side were finished in 1987, at which point, the entire 469 miles were open for public travel. This project had taken more than 50 years to complete. Over the course of its construction, it also served as a training ground for engineers. For essentially a generation, about 10% of the engineers at the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, later the Federal Highway Administration, went through part of their training working on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

• 43:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  When the parkway was first proposed as a connection between Shenandoah National Park and Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the assumption was that a lot of people would be using it to travel from one park to the other. But by the time the parkway was mostly finished in 1966, there were way more options to do that, thanks to the interstate highway system, spearheaded under the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and many other road-building projects. When the parkway is fully open, which currently it is not, it takes at least 10 or 12 hours to drive from one end to the other, and that's without really stopping to eat or go to the bathroom or, you know, look at anything.

• 44:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  Some people do the whole thing as more of a five or six day road trip with stops and sightseeing, but if your goal is just to get from one of those parks to the other, today there are highway routes that take more like five or six hours as long as you don't run into a lot of traffic problems.

• 44:40Holly Frey?

  Even before the Lynn Cove Viaduct was finished, the Blue Ridge Parkway had become one of the most popular parts of the national park system, surpassing Shenandoah National Park as the most visited national park in the U.S. And it definitely brought a surge of tourism to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and Virginia. According to the National Park Service, when it's fully open, the Parkway creates $1.3 billion in economic benefits annually, and it supports almost 18,000 jobs. Obviously, though, those communities' relationships with tourism are very complicated.

• 45:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Parkway has also faced other challenges. Although its original planners were focused on the preservation of native ecosystems and replanting native species along the Parkway, there's some evidence suggesting that the Parkway and its human and vehicle traffic have made it easier for non-native species and pathogens to really spread through the area. This includes plants like oriental bittersweet and floribunda rose, which can outcompete other plants, and insects like emerald ash borer and hemlock willie adelgin. And of course, there are issues like air pollution and runoff from roads and parking lots that would not be there without the Parkway.

• 46:00Holly Frey?

  And the reason that we keep saying "when it's fully open" when talking about the road is that Hurricane Helene did immense damage to the Blue Ridge Parkway, including downing tens of thousands of trees, causing landslides that buried or undercut the roadway, and washing out parts of the road through flooding. The entire Parkway had to be closed immediately after the storm, and more than 150 miles of it are still closed as of the end of May 2025. These closed sections are all in North Carolina. The Virginia section is open, apart from some roadwork unrelated to Helene, and the Roanoke Mountain Loop, which has been closed since a landslide in 2018 that was caused by the remnants of Hurricane Michael.

• 46:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  There has been some funding allocated to repairing all of this immense destruction, including disaster relief funding allocated by Congress and funds from the Federal Highway Administration. This includes $32.6 million in funding to be split between the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service for post-Haleen repairs to the parkway. But this will probably be a many, many years-long recovery process, especially since the National Park Service and other federal agencies have already been faced with budget cuts and layoffs under the Trump administration. There's a massive reduction in force plan for the National Park Service that, as of

• 47:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  this moment that we're recording, still seems to be tentative, not fully clear exactly how damaging the impact will be for all of that.

• 47:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  That's the Blue Ridge Parkway.

• 47:40Holly Frey?

  Do you have listener mail?

• 47:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  I do. I have listener mail from Maeve, and this is about a little bit of an older episode, but we ran it as a Saturday classic last year. The subject line is "Long Time Listener and the Subject of Bees." "Hi Holly and Tracy, I hope you are both doing well. I'm a longtime listener since about 2015 and first-time writer. I was recently listening to the Saturday classic on beekeeping, and some of your discussion of the bees themselves prompted me to chime in with my own experience. I thought you may like hearing more about the state or research for bees nowadays. While I can't speak for every state, I spent the better part of a year surveying bee species in central Louisiana as an undergraduate researcher under my college's entomologist, who has a fondness for them.

• 48:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  Biology, and especially entomology, are interesting fields because despite how long humans have observed the natural world, there is still a lot we don't know. Part of the issue is the disbalanced ratio of entomologists to insects. There are so, so many insects that most entomologists focus entirely on a select few groups or even just one group. There's also a severe lack of funding for biological sciences in general, but I'm sure you could have guessed that yourselves." I was faced with that unknown in a very real way when I started doing research for my proposal for the survey finding and found next to no prior research on bees in the state outside of two heavily populated areas. So when you mentioned the Africanized honeybees,

• 49:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  I found it a bit amusing because while it is entirely possible that they're in Louisiana, we have no idea. Even my studies barely scratched the surface of the species present, though there is a bigger project looking into it right now that I'm not part of. Like you said, though, honeybees have varying effects depending on the conditions they are in. On the green of our campus last spring, we did not find a single bee that was not the European honeybee or eastern carpenter bee. On the other hand, in the few times we collected in a prairie with only native forage, we didn't find a single one. Just as well, the physical differences between the Africanized bees and normal honeybees is so minor that it would likely be overlooked entirely unless one was specifically looking

• 49:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  for it or had familiarity with them. There were even times we got the bees that matched none of the resources we had available, but due to the complicated nature of DNA testing such a small organism, we didn't have much luck figuring out what they were past their family. I'd also like to mention for bee lovers, you might like to check out the Xerxes Society and official Pollinator Gardens. You're likely to find many lovely places you can support in some way and go observe bees and other pollinators like butterflies, beetles, and moths. I love your podcasts and everything you guys do and have been listening since shortly after both of you were on as hosts. When I first listened, I was in a dark place in my life and hearing the two of you helped me feel human again and less lonely. Your

• 50:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  podcast has gotten me through a lot of hard times. Nowadays, I have a lot, a long commute and a lot of time where I do tedious lab work, so having you guys to listen to is one of my favorite ways to spend the time. Even subjects I don't think will be interesting at first always end up intriguing me once I start the episode. Maeve goes on to say, as a longtime lover of Selicamp, the episode on Marjorie Courtney Lattery was a favorite, and there are also some suggestions for future episodes. And we have some pet tax with a Dotson named Fenrir, who is called Finny, a lab mix, Sissy, an orange cat named Nubby, a fuzz muffin Teddy who likes to shed over everybody, and

• 51:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  a mandatory alligator picture.

• 51:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  And then Maeve apologizes for being wordy. You do not need to apologize. This was a lovely email with a lot of very awesome pet pictures. All of these animals are very, very cute. I'm gonna click until I get to the alligator one.

• 51:46Holly Frey?

  I love an alligator.

• 51:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, I don't think the alligator is anyone's pet. It is just out in the wild. I mean, I say that as though it was likely. It's not anyone's pet, obviously. It is an alligator in the wild, just hanging out by the edge of the water. Thank you so much for this email. I like bees a lot, and so getting to return to the beekeeping episode, even though it was a bit ago, is lovely. If you'd like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, we're at [email protected]. And you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere else you like to get your podcasts.

• 52:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 52:46Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 53:18Speaker 03

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• 53:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  You ever show up late to the game and your friends already saved your seat, your drink, even a plate? That's looking out. That's having your back. And that's exactly what AT&T does with the AT&T Guarantee. They know staying connected matters, so they actually guarantee a network that comes through when it counts. AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right, just like that friend who takes care of things before you even ask. AT&T: Connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.

• 54:16Speaker 06

  Live Right, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.

• 54:44Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.