Shenandoah National Park

Established December 26, 1935

196,295 acres

The Skyline Drive, which runs for 105 miles along the crest of the Blue Ridge mountains, is flanked by a rumpled panorama of forests and mountains. To many who travel the drive, the highway itself is a park, complete with numerous deer-sitings along the way. But the cars are passing the real Shenandoah. Nearly 500 miles of trails crisscross Skyline Drive, and the Appalachian Trail roughly parallels it for its entire length.

The long, narrow park flows outward, upward, and downward from the highway that splits it. The drive, following ridge trails walked by Indians and early settlers, transports visitors to a park built on a frontier that lingered into modern times.

Unlike most national parks, Shenandoah is a place where settlers lived for over a century. To create the park, Virginia state officials acquired 3,850 privately owned tracts and donated the land to the nation. Never before had a large, populated expanse of private land been converted into a national park. And never before had planners made a park of land so used by humans.

In the decade before the park opened, some 465 families moved or were moved from their cabins and resettled outside the proposed park boundaries. A few mountaineers, though, lived out their lives in the park and were buried in the secluded graveyards of Shenandoah's vanished settlements.

Much of Shenandoah consisted of farmland and second- or third-growth forests logged since the early 1700s.

Today the marks of lumbering, grazing, and farming are disappearing as forests make a slow, steady comeback. Spring arrives first in the park valleys and then moves upward. Walking a valley trail, a visitor can follow spring's path and see, in a single day, a variety of flowers that bloom elsewhere over a span of weeks.