Book details forces that shaped parkway

NEAR BLUE RIDGE PARKWAY MILE MARKER 306 -- On a postcard-perfect Saturday at the Heffner Gap Overlook, Anne Mitchell Whisnant reads from one of the scores of informational signs -- known as "gun boards" for their frontier rifle logos -- posted along the 470 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway.

"There were few homegrown products more useful to the mountain farmer than apples," she reads. "Cuttings from favorite trees were often taken from place to place when the family moved or children left home. Today, old apple trees often indicate the location of a beloved but abandoned mountain homestead."

The gun board's evocation of a simple, pre-industrial mountain lifestyle is part of the grand, immensely popular illusion created by the National Park Service, Whisnant writes in her new book, "Super-Scenic Motorway: A Blue Ridge Parkway History." The book strips away decades of such myth-making fostered by tourism officials and the park service and details the social, economic and political battles that shaped a two-lane road that is the most visited place managed by the park service.

The gun boards, like the the rustic split-rail fences and occasional log cabin that border the road, "are supposed to evoke our pioneer ancestors," Whisnant said. Along with the parkway's carefully landscaped design, they support a notion that the southern Appalachians were a place "where people were not connected to what was going on industrially and in terms of the market economy."

"The park service loves to talk about the landscape architects and their vision and the design," Whisnant said during a recent drive along a 40-mile stretch of the road, from Julian Price Park south of Blowing Rock to Little Switzerland. "What there hasn't been attention to are these other forces -- historical, cultural, social ... political -- that also shaped the way the thing looks."

Though construction began at the height of the Great Depression, Whisnant debunks the popular perception that the parkway was a New Deal job creation project for the southern Appalachians. The road was actually intended to boost auto tourism between two relatively new national parks -- Shenandoah in Virginia and Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina and Tennessee.

Tourism officials in Western North Carolina's largest city, Asheville, saw the road as a potential boon for their Depression-troubled economy and were among the project's most vocal cheerleaders. They led a successful fight in 1934-35 to have the parkway routed near their city instead of turning west into Tennessee near Linville and ending at Gatlinburg, at the western entrance to Great Smoky Mountains.

Whisnant writes that other key decisions about where to build the parkway were often dictated by factors other than natural beauty, including the power politics of prominent Western North Carolina tourist developers, including Heriot Clarkson, owner of Little Switzerland, and Grandfather Mountain owner Hugh Morton.

Clarkson, a onetime state lawmaker and state Supreme Court justice, wrested a generous payment for the state for land taken for the parkway, then saw his struggling resort thrive as the "Only Resort Directly on the Blue Ridge Parkway." Little Switzerland remains one of the only places where private commercial activity exists directly on the road.

"That's not there because landscape architects thought it was real quaint and attractive," Whisnant said during a stop in Little Switzerland.

The media-savvy Morton persuaded the public the park service wanted to destroy his pristine Grandfather Mountain, conveniently ignoring the fact that it was used for timber production before it became a tourist attraction and that he had built a road up the side of the mountain so cars could drive to the top.